Accounting 

Open Dental has built-in accounting that is intended to replace QuickBooks for small offices. In the Manage module, click Accounting.

Click the Add button or the Edit button

If you are not familiar with how to setup a chart of accounts, then you should read a book or ask your accountant. The box for bank number only applies to assets. You can set the account to show as any color, making your frequently used accounts easier to spot.

Double click on an account to see the Transaction History for the account.

The Setup button in the menu is use to setup automated payment linking between the main Open Dental program, and the accounting section.

End of Year Reports

Includes a General Ledger report, listing all transactions from all accounts, and a Balance Sheet report.

Closing Out the Year

Just as with Quickbooks, there is no actual close out process as there used to be with older accounting software programs. Instead, simply lock all accounting entries before a specific date. Only an admin user can do this.  The lock is found in the menu bar of the Accounting window.

None of your accounts will ever be "zeroed out". Your asset, liability, and equity accounts will carry over to the next year fully intact. Your income and expense accounts are programmed to only show the accumulation since the beginning of the calendar year rather than including previous years.

There are two values on the Balance Sheet which need need clarification:

Net Income: Income minus Expenses since the beginning of the year for which the report is displayed.

Retained Earnings: This is the sum of the Net Income from all previous years.

Both of these values are shown on the Balance Sheet at the bottom of the Equity section.  They are very closely related, and they serve to incorporate the income and expense numbers into this report.  As explained above, they are handled automatically rather than requiring end-of-year entries to zero out the income and expense accounts.  Of course, you are still free to manually enter the closing transactions if that's what you are more familiar with.  In that case, when the software does the automatic calculations, it will just be dealing with zero amounts, so they would not have any effect.