Best Practice for changing Item's Income Account

We would like to adjust the income account on multiple items. However, ideally we would only want these changes to impact open periods.  It doesn't appear that NetSuite allows this.  I was told by one of our accountants that with Great Plains you could adjust the account and it will not be retroactive.  This would make sense.  Is there a way to accomplish the same thing in NetSuite? 

One alternative is to create new items every time you make a change.  This seems clunky given the fact that these may change often.  Additional, we use memorized transactions for our subscription model, and it would be difficult to manually update the thousands of transactions each time we made an account change.  Has anyone encountered this situation, or have a recommended best practice?