How to close a financial year & how to keep 'earmarked' funds

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 5/25/2017 11:49 AM, Maf. King wrote:
> Copying to list...
>
> On Thursday, 25 May 2017 16:33:39 BST you wrote:
>> Maf thanks so much!!!  Helpful certainly.  But I don’t understand IIRC, YMMV
>> and HTH.

Side by side reports, etc.

I can't really advise you on that as I do not try to do that sort of 
thing from within gnucash. I could have written the special reports 
(this was long before gnucash offered that special stuff) as I was an 
experienced analyst, and while never paid to program in LISP, could get 
by in it so could have handled the SCHEME (essentially, a lisp dialect). 
But a very experienced accountant told me "don't bother, Mike. Just 
produce the separate raw reports, export them, then use your favorite 
editor to put it all together, adding annotations, fixed text*, pretty 
printing, etc. under control, of that full power editor. That's what any 
of us would do."

In other words, the raw reports and what I present to the board of 
directors not the same. To fill out forms for the government, etc. might 
require different levels of detail/grouping than the boards would want 
to see.

Michael

* Being "public charities", the books are "open". Not that anybody from 
the public has ever asked to see them. But the reports have to be such 
that they WOULD make sense if seen. Thus while the BoD's of each 
organization know the accounting principles/choices used and wouldn't 
need to see them each time, they are included as fixed text. Statements 
like "fixed assets are durables costing more than $500 and will be 
depreciated over four years" << so somebody reading the financial report 
would know that durables costing under $500 would have been immediately 
expensed >>  And any unusual amounts are annotated. Certain lines in the 
report could be larger font, bold, etc. So even if getting the report 
side by side out of gnucash, would STILL be using an editor before 
getting to the finished product.