Archive Financial Records by Account or by Year
First, I try to keep electronic records (with appropriate backups) whenever it seems feasible: utility bills, credit card statements, bank statements, etc. This greatly cuts down on storage space, and are kept forever.  For hard copy records, it depends on the transaction.  I try to balance filing time and recover time, by how likely it is that I will need to access a record in the future.  I'm much less likely to need the receipt for this mornings coffee at Starbucks than I am to need the utility bill for my rental property (100%, come tax time).   For instance, by default I file my credit card receipts, that don't get filed elsewhere, by year with all cards kept together, and cull them after 5-7 years. I keep all of the credit card receipts, just because it is less effort for me than making a decision about what to keep and what to discard.  I put them in an accordion file by month of charge, and keep two, for the current year and previous years. At the beginning of each year, I get rid of the receipts in the oldest file and reuse it. Anything that needs to be kept longer that a couple of years gets filed separately. Certain records are kept together.  For example, car repair/maintenance receipts are filed by vehicle and kept for the life of the vehicle (could be useful when its sold, to provide the repair history).  All receipts for the rental property are kept together, organized by account. I'll keep these until the property is sold. All tax related receipts that don't have a specific file are kept together, by year, along with the tax return. "The short answer is ""it depends"", mainly on the type of record and how old it is. Most retained records should be organized by year first, then by type. Have a look at this: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/how-long-to-keep-financial-records.aspx Typically, you should do the following:"
Here is the technical guidance from the accounting standard FRS 23 (IAS 21) 'The Effects of Changes in Foreign Exchange Rates' which states: Exchange differences arising on the settlement of monetary items or on translating monetary items at rates   different from those at which they were translated on initial recognition during the period or in previous   financial statements shall be recognised in profit or loss in the period in which they arise. An example:  You agree to sell a product for $100 to a customer at a certain date. You would record the sale of this product on that date at $100, converted at the current FX rate (lets say £1:$1 for ease) in your profit loss account as £100. The customer then pays you several $100 days later, at which point the FX rate has fallen to £0.5:$1 and you only receive £50. You would then have a realised loss of £50 due to exchange differences, and this is charged to your profit and loss account as a cost. Due to double entry bookkeeping the profit/loss on the FX difference is needed to balance the journals of the transaction. I think there is a little confusion as to what constitutes a (realised) profit/loss on exchange difference. In the example in your question, you are not making any loss when you convert the bitcoins to dollars, as there is no difference in the exchange rate between the point you convert them. Therefore you have not made either a profit or a loss.  In terms of how this effects your tax position; you only pay tax on your profit and loss account. The example I give above is an instance where an exchange difference is recorded to the P&L. In your example, the value of your cash held is reflected in your balance sheet, as an asset, whatever its value is at the balance sheet date. Unfortunately, the value of the asset can rise/fall, but the only time where you will record a profit/loss on this (and therefore have an impact on tax) is if you sell the asset. "&gt; Speech is free. In and of itself it does not justify an investigation. Evidence does, and by all verifiable accounts there is no evidence of wrongdoing  Don Jr's email is **evidence** of attempted collusion.  He admitted it.  Free speech also has limits.  You can't yell ""fire"" in a crowded theater.  You can't discuss illegal things (it's called conspiracy).  &gt; otherwise they wouldn't need Meuhler to fish for it in completely irrelevant Trump family financial records from years before the election.  Trump's previous business dealings are totally relevant.  If he's colluding, those relationships didn't start in 2015.  They're going to look for earlier associations and business dealings with Russians that were later used for collusion.  &gt; http://nypost.com/2017/08/15/new-report-claims-dnc-hack-was-an-inside-job-not-russia/  I think the opinion of the 17 US intelligence services is a better source of info than a newspaper owned by News Corp.  There's not much question that the Russians attempted to influence the election.  https://www.google.com/amp/amp.usatoday.com/story/92514592/  &gt; What does your imagination tell you this Russian collusion that supposedly took place looked like?  I have no idea.  Let's let the investigation tell us." Generally speaking the bank accounts and credit card accounts remain open.  Banks and the credit card companies don't monitor public records on a daily basis.  Instead, whoever is handling your estate will need to obtain copies of your death certificate and they will then search your paper records to identify all accounts (reason to get your act together - there are books on the subject).  The executor will work with the banks and card companies to make sure all your charges and payments clear (common to have them open for months or even a year) and to make close or transfer autopays.  They will make sure to notify the credit agencies to flag your accounts so no new accounts can be created.  MANY copies of the death certicates are needed. "To answer your question briefly: net income is affected by many things inside and outside of management control, and must be supplemented by other elements to gain a clear picture of a company's health. To answer your question in-depth, we must look at the history of financial reporting: Initially, accounting was primarily cash-based. That is, a business records a sale when a customer pays them cash, and records expenses when cash goes out the door. This was not a perfectly accurate system, as cashflow might be quite erratic even if sales are stable (collection times may differ, etc.). To combat problems with cash-based accounting, financial reporting moved to an accrual-based system. An accrual is the recording of an item before it has fully completed in a cash transaction. For example, when you ship goods to a customer and they owe you money, you record the revenue - then you record the future collection of cash as a balance sheet item, rather than an income statement item. Another example: if your landlord charges you rent on December 31st for the past year, then in each month leading up to December, you accrue the expense on the income statement, even though you haven't paid the landlord yet. Accrual-based accounting leaves room for accounting manipulation. Enron is a prime example; among other things, they were accruing revenue for sales that had not occurred. This 'accelerated' their income, by having it recorded years before cash was ever collectible. There are specific guidelines that restrict doing things like this, but management will still attempt to accelerate net income as much as possible under accounting guidelines. Public companies have their financial statements audited by unrelated accounting firms - theoretically, they exist to catch material misstatements in the financial statements. Finally, some items impacting profit do not show up in net income - they show up in ""Other Comprehensive Income"" (OCI). OCI is meant to show items that occurred in the year, but were outside of management control. For example, changes in the value of foreign subsidiaries, due to fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Or changes in the value of company pension plan, which are impacted by the stock market. However, while OCI is meant to pick up all non-management-caused items, it is a grey area and may not be 100% representative of this idea. So in theory, net income is meant to represent items within management control. However, given the grey area in accounting interpretation, net income may be 'accelerated', and it also may include some items that occurred by some 'random business fluke' outside of company control. Finally, consider that financial statements are prepared months after the last year-end. So a company may show great profit for 2015 when statements come out in March, but perhaps Jan-March results are terrible. In conclusion, net income is an attempt at giving what you want: an accurate representation of the health of a company in terms of what is under management control. However it may be inaccurate due to various factors, from malfeasance to incompetence.  That's why other financial measures exist - as another way to answer the same question about a company's health, to see if those answers agree. ex: Say net income is $10M this year, but was only $6M last year - great, it went up by $4M! But now assume that Accounts Receivable shows $7M owed to the company at Dec 31, when last year there was only $1M owed to the company. That might imply that there are problems collecting on that additional revenue (perhaps revenue was recorded prematurely, or perhaps they sold to customers who went bankrupt).  Unfortunately there is no single number that you can use to see the whole company - different metrics must be used in conjunction to get a clear picture." "A few practical thoughts: A practical thing that helps me immensely not to loose important paperwork (such as bank statements, bills, payroll statement, all those statements you need for filing tax return, ...) is: In addition to the folder (Aktenordner) where the statements ultimately need to go I use a Hängeregistratur. There are also standing instead of hanging varieties of the same idea (may be less expensive if you buy them new - I got most of mine used): you have easy-to-add-to folders where you can just throw in e.g. the bank statement when it arrives. This way I give the statement a preliminary scan for anything that is obviously grossly wrong and throw it into the respective folder (Hängetasche). Every once in a while I take care of all my book-keeping, punch the statements, file them in the Aktenordner and enter them into the software. I used to hate and never do the filing when I tried to use Aktenordner only. I recently learned that it is well known that Aktenordner and Schnellhefter are very time consuming if you have paperwork arriving one sheet at a time. I've tried different accounting software (being somewhat on the nerdy side, I use gnucash), including some phone apps.  Personally, I didn't like the phone apps I tried - IMHO it takes too much time to enter things, so I tend to forget it. I'm much better at asking for a sales receipt (Kassenzettel) everywhere and sticking them into a calendar at home (I also note cash payments for which I don't have a receipt as far as I recall them - the forgotten ones = difference ends up in category ""hobby"" as they are mostly the beer or coke after sports). I was also to impatient for the cloud/online solutions I tried (I use one for business, as there the archiving is guaranteed to be according to the legal requirements - but it really takes far more time than entering the records in gnucash)." There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account. "As long as you didn't ""forget"" to report any income with regards to these accounts, you should be fine doing that. See more information and specific instructions on this IRS site." "I don't know if this is ""valid"" from a bookkeeping/accounting standpoint, but I'm just trying to keep records for myself so this works for me unless someone has another suggestion. I created two Expense accounts for the HSA (Roth, etc would work the same way): (""CY"" meaning current year.) When I make a $50 contribution, I enter the following splits: When you look at this in the Accounts tab, it shows the parent account with a zero balance (because the subaccount balance is positive and the parent account is negative). The subaccount has the balance accumulated so far; this lets me see the YTD contributions to my HSAs. At the end of the year I will make a closing transaction in the opposite direction (for whatever the total balance of the CY account is): This will zero-balance these two accounts. The only complication I see remaining is the issue of making contributions for the prior year during the January-April time frame. I don't generally make current-year contributions followed by prior-year contributions, so I can just wait to enter the closing transaction until I know I'm done with prior-year contributions."