My year end is 5 April 2026 and I am getting ready to close the books off for the year by journaling everything to Retained Profit and Reserves. I don’t want to use the QF process to do this but want to do it manually. What date should I use for the journal I will prepare, 5 April or 6 April? If I use 5 April can I still run a P&L and B/S afterwards for the year up to 5 April, or will the profit be zeroed? If I use the 6 April will the P&L to the next year ending 5 April 2027 start with negative income and expenses?
The QuickFile process does exactly what you describe - it makes a journal dated on your Year End date which zeroes out all the P&L codes and puts the balancing amount onto “retained profit”. But the year end journal specifically has a special status in QuickFile in that it is ignored if you run a P&L report up to the year end date (so you can still view previous years’ P&L as it was before everything was zeroed-out for the next year).
A manually created journal, even one dated on the year end date, does not get this special status, so if you were to create your own journal to zero the P&L without using the year end process then your previous year P&L report would show all zeros.
Thanks, that’s very clear. I think I will use the Quickfile process instead.