My company is set up like most: the first month of both the fiscal year and the tax year is January. My closing date is set as 12/31/2019. I've read that QuickBooks is supposed to automatically make year end adjustments, but it doesn't appear mine has made any.
My Retained Earnings account still has the same balance it had from 2018. QuickBooks didn't adjust it to reflect 2019 earnings whatsoever. All my equity accounts (dividends) have their balances still and all my expense accounts still have all of 2019's balances in them.
I'm now making our company's January entries and it's just adding the expense amounts to the balance carried over from 2019. Instead of zeroing out those expense accounts so we can see what the current year is spending. More or less, there's nothing to differentiate that I'm accounting in a new year. No balances have changed from 12/31/19 to 01/01/20.
What am I doing wrong here? How do I get the retained earnings to actually reflect what was earned in 2019 (it's still showing 2018 balance, even though it's now 2020)? How do I get my expense accounts to begin with a zero balance for this fiscal year? How do I clear my dividend equity accounts?
