"Close Book" tool

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

"Fred Bone" <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com> writes:

> I've just experimented with the "Close Book" tool, new with 2.2.4.
>
> I chose to close at year-end (2007-12-31), but left the target accounts 
> as the default "Equity".
>
> All my Income is in GBP, but I have expenditure in EUR and CHF as well. I 
> was not surprised to find it had created "Equity:CHF" and "Equity:EUR", 
> but I was surprised to find "Equity:GBP", and even more so to find that 
> whereas all the GBP Expenditure had been assigned there, all the Income 
> had gone to plain "Equity" - which is a placeholder.

Hmm, yeah, I didn't specifically look for placeholder accounts..
Arguably that's a bug, but if you DO specify a placeholder and
only have one currency, then what should it do?

> This may reflect the order in which things are done (i.e. the tool may 
> have done the income before finding that expenditure needed to be split). 
> It's not a problem as such - I'm experimenting at this stage, and can 
> easily create suitable sub-accounts when I do it for real.

It's not a question of order.  It just does Income and Expense
separately in two passes.  The transactions (and accounts) are
created in each pass.  As there's nothing tying the Expenses
to the Income there's no reason to hold them together.  The
user may choose different Equity accounts.

> Any comments, from anyone who knows how things "should be done"? In 
> particular, any reason *not* to put the Income to the same equity sub-
> account as the (GBP) Expenditure?

There's no particular reason to do it one way or the other.  The
current result is an artifact of how I implemented it.  I don't
use multiple currencies so this was never an issue for me.  The
separate currency accounts was brought to my attention during the
development of the feature, which is why I implemeneted it at all!
But... this is why you have control over your Income Equity vs.
Expense Equity accounts, so you can put them wherever you want.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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