End of year processing?

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Jan 08, 2002 at 07:30:35AM +1100, Doug Laidlaw was heard to remark:
> To me, in Australia, "close the books" means to carry all income and expense 
> balances to a "profit and loss" account for the year in question, then 
> transfer the balance of that account to an equity account called "capital" or 
> similar.  This is done at the end of each year, and a new profit and loss 
> account is created each time.

The new gnucash system does this automatically. It also tracks which new
account is paired to which old account (so that, in theory, if a closed
book was changed, the opening balances in the open book could be
automatically updated.  But changing closed books isn't implemented).

Previously entered transactions are automatically sorted either into 
the closed or the open books, depending on the date boundary.

> because you are still using the same file.  I have used Quickbooks, but I 
> can't say whether a "memorized transaction" list from one file would be 
> available for a new file.  I doubt it.

By default, scheduled transactions & the like would always be kept with
the new file.  (And, as currently designed, would *ahem* be deleted from
the old books. Maybe that needs fixing ???)

-- linas

-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933