Your Retained Earnings account reflects the cumulative total of your company's income and expenses from all previous years, katmichaels.
Can you tell us if you used the Close Books feature to finalize the retained earnings for the previous year. If so, QuickBooks Online automatically transfers the net income from the past fiscal year to your financial reports under Retained Earnings. This account sums up your company's income and expenses over all prior years.
This automatic transfer means you don't need to manually create a journal entry to move the net income to the retained earnings account. You only need to do the extra step of creating journal entries if you're distributing them to partners. We recommend continuing to work with your accountant for additional advice on this matter.
Please note that the entry that you've made would show as a negative entry since you're debiting the retained earnings account. However, the actual balance of this account is the one shown in your financial reports and not in the Chart of Accounts.
Let me give you these articles for additional details about retained earnings and how QBO handles this account:
Check out these articles for additional resources when managing capital or investments in QBO:
Feel free to visit us again or reply to this discussion if you have additional questions later on regarding running financial reports, performing bookkeeping functions, or other areas of QuickBooks Online. The Community is available whenever you need assistance.
