Year-End Procedures

Beancount uses Continuous Accounting, which means you do not need to close out your books at the end of the year like a traditional business. Your Income and Expense accounts just keep accumulating history.

However, many users like to perform a “Year-End Check” to lock in their history.

1. Verify Balances

On Dec 31st (or Jan 1st), log into all your banks and check the exact balance. Add a balance assertion for every asset and liability account.

2024-01-01 balance Assets:Bank:Checking   1234.56 USD
2024-01-01 balance Liabilities:Visa      -450.00 USD

This ensures that no future edits can accidentally break your history for 2023.

2. Generate Reports

Since you don’t zero out accounts, you must filter by date to see your annual performance.

# Income Statement for 2023
bean-report main.beancount income --year=2023

3. (Optional) “Clear” Equity

If you really want to zero out your Income/Expense accounts (simulating a “closing”), you can transfer their balances to Equity:Retained-Earnings.

Note: This is manual and usually discouraged in Beancount because it destroys the ability to run multi-year reports easily.

4. Archive Documents

If you store receipts, now is a good time to zip up the 2023/ folder.