What closing entries would Facebook make for fiscal year 2015?

Facebook, Inc., is a publicly held corporation and issued its financial statements for 2015 in mid-2016. To follow is a condensed and adapted trial balance as of December 31, 2015, that was constructed from those financial statements.

Please note that the accounts have been adapted and condensed for educational use and should not be used for investment decisions.

Facebook Trial Balance

You can download the Excel version of the trial balance here.

Facebook’s complete, unabridged financial statements can be found on its investor relations website.

Questions (calculate each of the following totals using Facebook’s trial balance)

1. What are closing entries? Why are they made?
2. What accounts on Facebook’s trial balance should be closed?
3. Using the Facebook trial balance, what closing entries would Facebook make for 2015?
4. What was Facebook’s net income for the year ended December 31, 2015?

Instructor Resources

These resources are provided to give the instructor flexibility for use of Accounting in the Headlines articles in the classroom. The blog posting itself can be assigned via a link to this site OR by distributing the student handout below. Alternatively, the PowerPoint file below contains a bullet point overview of the article and the discussion questions.

• Student handout (pdf) (word) (contains entire blog posting + discussion questions)
• PowerPoint file (brief article overview + discussion questions)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.