Year end and the close
At the end of a financial year a bookkeeper expects a second ritual: a year-end close on top of the monthly one, closing entries that sweep the profit and loss into equity, and a fresh set of books for January. This page is about what SKU.io does instead — which is less than you might be bracing for.
There is no separate year-end close
The Close tab closes calendar months, and only calendar months. Every month is the same shape: the same checklist, the same nine reports, the same Close period button. December is a month like any other, and closing it is the same job as closing June.
That means there is nothing extra to find at year end:
- No year-end action. The buttons on the Close tab are the same in December as in every other month — Export pack, Start close / Re-check and Close period, plus Verify and Reopen… once the month is closed.
- No annual period in the rail. The Periods rail lists months — Dec 2026, Nov 2026, and so on. There is no year row to select and no twelfth-month variant of the checklist.
- No closing entries. SKU.io does not post a journal that empties your income and expense accounts into equity at the year boundary, so your books do not restart at zero on January 1.
- No roll-forward step. Nothing has to be carried into the new year by hand. January opens as an ordinary month as soon as it exists.
Closing the twelve months is the year end. When December is closed and locked, the year is closed and locked with it, because the lock is a date: entries can no longer post on or before December 31.
Where Retained Earnings comes from
Because there are no closing entries, the profit you have made has to reach the balance sheet some other way. It does — as a computed line.
Open the Balance Sheet report in the month's report pack and the last line under equity reads Retained Earnings, with a dash where every other row shows an account code:
| Code | Name | Type | Section | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2200 | Sales Tax | Currliab | liabilities | 1,558.33 |
| — | Retained Earnings | Equity | equity | 295,129.51 |
The dash is the point: Retained Earnings is not an account in your chart of accounts. It has no code, nothing posts to it, and no ledger entry sits behind it — see the chart of accounts reference for the accounts that do exist. It is the running total of everything on your income statement — revenue minus expenses — from the start of your books up to the last day of the month you are looking at, added to equity so that assets equal liabilities plus equity.
Two consequences worth knowing at year end:
- It is cumulative, not annual. The figure does not reset in January. December 2026's balance sheet and January 2027's balance sheet both carry every year of trading you have recorded, which is what a retained-earnings line is supposed to do — it just gets there by arithmetic rather than by a journal.
- It moves whenever an income-statement figure moves. Post something dated inside an earlier month and the computed line changes with it. Inside a closed month you can't, because the month is locked; that is one of the things the lock is protecting. See what closing does to your books.
What the year's numbers look like
The report pack is built one month at a time, and each report is scoped accordingly:
- Income Statement and COGS cover the month's date range — Dec 1, 2026 – Dec 31, 2026. There is no year-to-date column.
- Balance Sheet, Inventory Valuation and GINR Balance are stated as at the last day of the month, so they already carry the whole year — and every year before it.
- Trial Balance does both at once. Its columns are Opening Balance, Period Debits, Period Credits and Closing Balance: the two middle columns are the month's movement, the outer two are balances as at the month's first and last day.
So the annual picture comes from two places. The Balance Sheet at December is your year-end position as it stands. For the year's trading, go to Accounting → Reports → Income Statement and set the Start Date and End Date across the year — see read your financial statements. The close itself does not produce an annual statement.
If your fiscal year is not the calendar year
SKU.io has no fiscal-year setting: months are calendar months, closes run oldest-first, and the lock is a date. A business whose year ends on June 30 or March 31 closes exactly the same twelve months as everyone else — the fiscal boundary simply falls between two of them.
What that means in practice:
- Close your fiscal year end like any other month. For a June year end, June is a normal month with a normal checklist. When it is closed and locked, your fiscal year is closed and locked.
- Mark it for the people who read it later. The Close notes (optional) box in the close dialog is the place — a note like Fiscal year end — statutory figures signed off with the accountant stays with the month, shows on the sign-off panel, and prints on the cover sheet of the exported pack.
- A custom checklist item makes it repeatable. Your business can add its own items to the checklist, which appear under Custom on every month. One named for your year-end work gives the twelfth close a step the other eleven don't have, and records who did it. See close settings and custom checklist items.
- Expect the reports to ignore the boundary. Retained Earnings is cumulative from the start of your books, and the pack's income statement is one month. Neither knows where your fiscal year starts, so year-based figures come from Accounting → Reports with the dates you choose, or from your accounting provider, which is where the fiscal calendar lives.
Next steps
- Close a month — the December close, and every other one.
- Read the month's reports — what each of the nine reports covers.
- What closing does to your books — what the lock stops.
- Month boundaries and timezones — why a month is a calendar month.