Bump: setting the accounting period

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 11:03 +0100, Geert Janssens wrote:
> > This is probably an embarrassingly simple question but - how do I set up
> > for an accounting year that runs from 1 July through 30 June?
> > 
> > The options available in Edit->Preferences are:
> > 
> >    today
> >    start of this month
> >    start of previous month
> >    start of this quarter
> >    start of previous quarter
> >    start of this year
> >    start of previous year
> >    absolute

The more I look at these, the less I understand them. How can the start
of the accounting period be "today"? What does that mean? Is it
converted to a date for internal use? If so, does it change every day,
or does it stay the same, once set? What are the start and end dates
actually used for?

Accounting in Australia very commonly runs from 1 July through 30 June.
It seems to me that to support that, GnuCash would have to add a field
to this dialogue "Year starts on", with a  default of "1 January", and
permitting values such as "1 January" "start January", "end January".
This additional field would then permute the meaning of "this year",
"last year" etc.

I'd like to discuss this before I post it as an idea. How do other
Australian users handle this?

Regards, K.
 
-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer/                   +61-428-957160 (mob)

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