how to close income summary account

You must debit your revenue accounts to decrease it, which means you must also credit your income summary account. A net loss would decrease retained earnings so we would do the opposite in this journal entry by debiting Retained Earnings and crediting Income Summary. Why was income summary not used in the dividends closing entry?

A company must be able to account for net income for financial
reporting, taxation, and internal decision making purposes. Let’s extend the
example of Company X, which had a $44,000 profit in its first year of
operations. If it all seems a bit complex or maybe you are a small business owner income summary account who takes on their own accounting, you may wonder if you really need to know closing entries in practice. The beautiful thing is that some accounting programs like QuickBooks, make these entries for you. Post the transactions to the income summary account and close the income summary account.

Types of Accounts

I didn’t see this information jumping out at me in the info links you provided nor was I able to find the answer by searching the Help within QBO. If your company doesn’t have dividends then you won’t need https://www.bookstime.com/ to do this step. If it does, you’ll need to debit retained earnings and credit dividends like in the example here. Balances of permanent accounts are carried forward to the subsequent accounting period.

The closing entries are the journal entry form of the Statement of Retained Earnings. The goal is to make the posted balance of the retained earnings account match what we reported on the statement of retained earnings and start the next period with a zero balance for all temporary accounts. Once this process is complete, a post-closing trial balance is prepared which helps in preparation of the balance sheet. Accountants may perform the closing process
monthly or annually.