Closing the Accounting Year

[RLM]

I chose to open a new thread as opposed to tagging a thread that was years old. But here is my question which is prefaced by a comment.

As this community knows, I am not nearly as skilled in accounting principles as many that post on this forum and that in itself is a bit intimidating. I tackled the treasurer's responsibilities after dragging my feet for years, but now that I have done so for the past 3 years, I am fairly comfortable with 'bean counting'...

I am puzzled by the term 'Closing the Accounting Year'. Keep in mind that I have a VERY small church and an annual budget of less than $200,000. I don't understand that term if it means additional year-end transactions in a CASH FLOW accounting environment. I merely transact only the items that impact each months issues/receipts and submit an Annual Report in January of the New Year after they have all been posted. After the Annual Report has been prepared I do not make any additional transactions to prior months even though I have not closed them.

What are some examples of year-end transactions? I am concerned that I may be missing something and curiosity has won out over the fear that I have missed something that I should have been doing over the last three years.

[tborgal]

This was something that had to be done in older versions of PC+. I am not certain what version this changed in, memory loss in my old age, but if you are using version 10 or newer you do not even have the option to do this. The older versions did not maintain the previous years financial data whereas the current version maintains all data and allows you to post transactions to any of the previous 18 months - actually 17 months and the current month. I still make a full directory backup at the end of each year. Some might call this paranoia, but this way I still have the data available to me should there be any old data cleanup and I find a need to get at it in the future.

Hope this helps answer you question.

[RLM]

Thanks Tom -

That is how I interpreted everything that I was reading, but needed to pose the question so that someone could verify my conclusion. Thank you for your comment...