I started using KMM last year to track my accounts, having never used anything to track anything before.

What do people normally do for year-end? Do they close the books? (What does that even mean -- my computer screen is not a book, it's not even a laptop LOL?) Do they just keep on going in the same file?

I suppose if I do a "save as", remove all transactions, then set all initial balances to Jan 1 balances, it would simulate a new start but keep all of my schedules and categories. Or is there a better way?

Thanks
-drew

Not in the case of KMyMoney. The more data you have the better. Keep using the same file and don't delete anything.
I have been using the same file since 2005.

'Closing the books' is important if you are a business. You have to be able to specify income and outgoings for the company year, to define taxes. For personal use I don't think there is any benefit at all in using the facility, so I'd agree with Hei Ku, just ignore it.

ok, thanks!

I have been using in succession, Quicken, MSMoney and KMyMoney over a period of some 15 years.
I have run my personal finances and a small business side-by side separated by categories and have never needed to "Close the Books"

At the end of the tax year I run reports which separate my personal and business transactions and produce sets of accounts for the tax year, personal and business.

This works well for me. Closing off accounts would mean you lost a lot of history useful for forecasting.

Always keep backups of course - some in perpetuity just in case!

But what is one wants to use the KMM for a small business and needs to close accounts. Is there a way how to do this?
The latest Gnucash has an option to close the books for a financial year and start zero. Unfortunately the entries although effective "dead" stay in the system and can't be filtered out. In KMM they can be optically filter but stay active accounting wise.

In India the books get closed and the data removed.

Can I do something like that?

You could just copy the file and delete those transactions you don't want. You can even adjust the opening balances if necessary.

But I fail to see what's the value in deleting data you already have. It may be done like that for hard books, but I don't find it worthy for electronic records. Even more so when we have several features that profit from having old data to compare to.