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End of financial year: closing transactions
I'm not sure there's a good reason to do a "closing the books" ceremony for personal finance accounting. (And you're not only wanting to do that, but have a fiscal year that's different from the calendar year? Yikes!) My understanding is that usually this process is done for businesses to be able to account for what their "Retained Earnings" and such are for investors and tax purposes; generally individuals wouldn't think of their finances in those terms. It's certainly not impossible, though. Gnucash, for example, implements a "Closing Books" feature, which is designed to create transactions for each Income and Expenses account into an end-of-year Equity Retained Earnings account. It doesn't do any sort of closing out of Assets or Liabilities, however. (And I'm not sure how that would make any sense, as you'd transfer it from your Asset to the End-of-year closing account, and then transfer it back as an Opening Balance for the next year?) If you want to keep each year completely separate, the page about Closing Books in the Gnucash Wiki mentions that one can create a separate Gnucash file per year by exporting the account tree from your existing file, then importing that tree and the balances into a new file. I expect that it makes it much more challenging to run reports across multiple years of data, though. While your question doesn't seem to be specific to Gnucash (I just mention it because it's the accounting tool I'm most familiar with), I'd expect that any accounting program would have similar functionality. I would, however, like to point out this section from the Gnucash manual: Note that closing the books in GnuCash is unnecessary. You do not need to zero out your income and expense accounts at the end of each financial period. GnuCash’s built-in reports automatically handle concepts like retained earnings between two different financial periods. In fact, closing the books reduces the usefulness of the standard reports because the reports don’t currently understand closing transactions. So from their point of view it simply looks like the net income or expense in each account for a given period was simply zero. And that's largely why I'm just not sure what your goals are. If you want to look at your transactions for a certain time, to "just focus on the range of years I'm interested in for any given purpose" as you say, then just go ahead and run the report you care about with those years as the dates. The idea of "closing books" comes from a time when you'd want to take your pile of paper ledgers and go put them in storage once you didn't need to refer to them regularly. Computers now have no challenges storing "every account from the beginning of time" at all, and you can filter out that data to focus on whatever you're looking for easily. If you don't want to look at the old data, just don't include them in your reports. I'm pretty sure that's the "better way to keep the books manageable".