Closing out year and beginning new one

Paul Lussier pll@mclinux.com
Wed, 12 Dec 2001 09:41:40 -0500


In a message dated: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 18:59:18 EST
Chuck Parker said:

>Does anyone have any ideas on closing out an old year and beginning a new one 
>in Gnucash? Do you have to set up from scratch as you did when you first 
>began to use Gnucash or are there some  short cuts.
>
>Any comments will be appreciated.

Well, rumor has it that in a future release, GnuCash will understand 
the concept of "accounting periods" and therefore make this excercise 
a somewhat less painful operation.

Until such a time, though, I think I have this finally figured out.  
Unfortunately it's a somewhat manual and tedious process.

One thing to note; Since my banks seem to enjoy making my life 
difficult by having my statements cross month boundaries, this 
process is a little more painful than I think it should be :(

Anyway, what I've done is this:

	1. Set up Gnucash with a starting year (year 2000 in my case)
	   Because my statement boundaries cross months, they
	   necessarilly cross years as well.  Therefore, my
	   gnucash-2000.xac file contains data from Dec 1999 
	   which is also where I got my initial "Opening Balance"
	   for all my accounts from.

	   Setup includes creating a "chart of accounts" obviously.

	2. Populate GnuCash with data until an "end of year" point.

	   You need to pick your own "end of year" point.  For me
	   it's Dec 31st.  Any transaction after this goes into
	   the following year's .xac file.

	3. At end of year do the following:

		a. Export chart of accounts to a file.

		   I named mine accounts.xac.  In retrospect
		   I might have been better off naming it accounts-year.xac
		   in case I need to go back to it for something.
		   Unfortunately, I've overwritten this file a couple
		   times as my chart of accounts has changed.

		b. Create a new "year" in GnuCash.

		   This can be done either by copying accounts.xac
		   to a new file name and opening that file name,
		   or by opening accounts.xac within gnc and saving
		   to a new file name.  Either way works fine.

		c. Start populating the new "year" with data.

		   Obviously you'll need to "bring forward" your
		   balances from the previous year.  I used my
		   "Equity" account for this.  I might have
		   actually set up sub-accounts for each account
		   I was bringing forward, I don't remember.  Either
		   way, it doesn't really matter as long as you end up
		   with the information you want.

		   If you've chosen the ending date of your last
		   statement of the year as your "end of year" date,
		   then this is simple as looking at the "ending balance"
		   on the statement.  If, however, you're being anal about
		   things like me :)  You need to find a list of
		   "running balances" and hope it has one sufficiently
		   close to, or even after the last dated transaction
		   on the statement.  As it was, I needed to fudge
		   some things in GnuCash a little to make this
		   work for the y2k-y2k+1 transition.

	4. goto #2 :)


Hope that helps!
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
----

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