AccountingBLOCK - Accounting Forums

I hope you can follow this as I am not an accountant. I have QB Pro 2008.

My fiscal year ends 3/31. When I started using Quickbooks, I entered data back to the beginning of this past fiscal year, 4/1/07. Before I started, I made a Journal Entry for 3/31/07 giving the opening balance of my retained earnings. All has been fine until now. On my balance sheet for 4/30/08, now I have two entries for retained earnings: one is the original entry I made on 3/31/07, and the other is a retained earnings account showing my retained earnings as of 3/31/08. I thought Quickbooks would automatically transfer the net income into the retained earnings account; however, it hasn't. Do I have to live with two retained earnings accounts?

I was told by someone only slightly familiar with QB that thereason I now have two retained earnings accounts is that I did not "close" the books at the end of the fiscal year. I chose not to close the books because I didn't want to zero out my income/expense accounts as there
will be occasions that I will want to make comparative reports between last fiscal year and this fiscal year.

So...will I just have to live with two retained earnings account in the future? I thought perhaps I could make a one-time manual entry to retained earnings, but I certainly dont want to have to make manual entries every month.

I will appreciate any help here.

Thanks..

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Conrad Poth

It sounds like you have two retained earnings accounts - one that you set up and one that QB set up. QB automatically "closes" the prior year earnings into retained earnings so that should not be an issue. Your income/expense accounts reset to $0 for the current year but the prior year entries remain.

You should make sure that the manual entry you made went into the same retained earnings account that QB is using.

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Zahid H. Lilani

QB does not require that you close the books to calculate retained earnings. It automatically happens when you run reports. Try running a detail transaction report for 12/07 to 5/08 and you will see the retained earnings for 2007 instead of the transactions for the prior fiscal year.

You entered the RE account in your JE and you now have 2 accounts. Replace that JE with a full Trial balance as of 3/31/07. RE is not on the TB so this account is not used. QB will use the correct internally maintained RE account when you run reports.