A simple End-of-Period question

[Derek Atkins]

James Leone <linuxcpa at netscape.net> writes:

> Just like with quickbooks you don't need to close the year, you just
> set your report perameters to match the time period that you want to
> report on.
> 
> There was a recent patch to the balance sheet and I think it will be a
> part of the next version of Gnucash. It will let you set a time in
> which to report p&l on the balance sheet as a component of retained
> earnings. You can do monthly, quarterly, even daily reports.

Yep, this patch will be in 1.8.5 (whenever that is released --
probably next month).

This works provided you can clearly delineate transaction periods on
date boundaries.  In a half-accrual-accounting system like GnuCash
that might not be possible.

> Gnucash's data files do not take a lot of space, so it seems that
> closing the year and separating transactions is more of a problem then
> what it is worth.

Agreed, doing it by hand is probably not worth while.  My hope is that
we can help automate this in a future release.  Realistically,
"closing the books" is a good thing if for no other reason than
performance.  GnuCash has to keep all the transactions in RAM; if you
have many many years of data, this can be cumbersome, whereas
splitting it into multiple files would really help performace.

> James Leone

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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