more newbie q's

[Derek Atkins]

"Divakar R (thru' VSNL)" <divakar_r at vsnl.net> writes:

> So, does this mean that a GnuCash file always contains *all* data? Is 

Yes.

> there a way to create a new file at the beginning of each financial 
> year such that all assets and liabilities are transferred from the old 
> file while the income and expenses are blank in the file for the new 
> year?

At this point, no.

> I am new to GnuCash, having migrated recently from Wings 2000 
> (www.wingsinfonet.com). Wings 2000 had a function called 'Year end 
> process' which did the job of creating a new file and optionally 
> transferring just the assest and liabilities, or all, or no accounts.

Yea, I understand what it means.  GnuCash does not do this, yet.
It makes it harder to do multi-period reporting if you do this ;)

> I guess it is not very difficult to just make a copy of the existing 
> file for the new year and delete transactions for expenses and income, 
> but this would also affect the asset accounts? What is the correct way 
> with GnuCash to maintain yearly accounts in seperate files so that tax 
> calculation etc can be restarted every year?

Right now, you don't worry about it.  The reports will deal for you.
The code to implement part of this is in CVS, so it will get into the
next release (hopefully).

> --Divakar

-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
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