Has anyone installed the GnucashEditor (view & edit GnuCash Files)?

[Derek Atkins]

Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> writes:

> PS: You MIGHT want to request of the developers that they provide this
> operation; open a new set of books from an old set (copy all accounts
> of the old books and an opening transaction made up of all non-zero
> balance accounts. Otherwise, while to do this manually is some work,
> remember its something you would do just once in an accounting
> period. In terms of time saving, anything that the developers can do
> that save even just a few seconds on an operation that you do
> thousands of times during an accounting period is more time savings
> than automating something that might take many minutes but you do just
> once.

We have half of it: File -> Export Accounts --- which makes a copy of
the existing Chart of Accounts in a new book that you can then File ->
Open.  From there you need to manually create your opening balances.
Note that this does NOT copy any business objects, so you will lose all
your customers, vendors, employees, and associated invoices, bills, and
vouchers.

There was a project that was half-way completed to do what you suggest,
but it's a bit harder than you might think.  You cannot just make sums
of all your asset/liability accounts and set opening balances.  There
are some assets that you cannot ignore and collapse into an opening
balance.  For example, you need to keep the purchase dates and amounts
of stocks you buy.

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available