[pencilpusher]

A company's year end just passed and very few transactions were entered. The company is a service company and has one customer. All transactions are on the bank statements.

Can I use the bank statements and make a year end journal entry that will create accurate financial statements? By doing this, can I move forward to the next year without problems.

PP

[morgaine300]

Cash basis or accrued basis? This is a whole lot easier to deal with if you're doing cash basis. If you're doing accrued basis, you could have some invoices (sent or received) that have to be entered to recognize some revenues or expenses, and you could have other things to accrue and adjustments to make.

Even if you're on a cash basis, do you know that everything necessary to do the statements actually went through the bank account? I can think of things that wouldn't. You have to record all "economic events," not just cash events.

Whether you would know if anything else exists that needs recorded is going to depend on your level of knowledge about bookkeeping. I glanced at your other posts trying to get some info and I would say your knowledge is possibly not up to par to state conclusively that everything went through the checking account.

Just as a note:
https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/accoun...me-314045.html
The answer given to you in that thread is incorrect. First, someone should have mentioned the net income is revenues minus expenses. Second, equity, even in the first year, is not necessarily just net income. While net income does accumulate in equity, making it appear that the first year would equal net income, this doesn't account for withdrawals made by the owner, nor for an investment made by the owner when the company opened, or later. The only way it could equal net income is if all start-up money was from a loan and the owner withdrew absolutely nothing. Equity is + investments, - withdrawals, and +(-) net income(loss). If that's still screwed up, you might want to go correct that. You don't figure out net income off the balance sheet - it's on the income statement.

Anyway, some examples of non-bank account things that need recorded, even on a cash basis, is like purchasing an asset and getting a loan. If you have any depreciable assets, you have to depreciate them. That's just a couple of examples. All sorts of stuff like that could exist.

And even if we assume there's nothing like that, did you do a good job of going through January's bank statement and catching anything that had been outstanding as of December?

It would probably be useful to know what the company does and whether it's really going to be that simple. And is it a sole proprietorship. If it is and you have no real good reason to stick to GAAP, then your priority is going to be for taxes. (I hope you filed for an extension if this isn't done yet, or you have a different fiscal year-end.)

[pencilpusher]

Thank you for your help.