End of year (again :-) and reports

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

gh <gh1000 at earthlink.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Using GC 1.8.8 on Fedora for a small business.
>
> *First question:
> If have understood correctly there are two ways to "close the 
> books" or whatever you want to call the process of putting Net 
> Income into Retained Earnings.
>
> 1 - Transfer each and every Expense and Income ending account 
> balance to Retained earnings thereby starting the year with 
> Expenses and Income with zero
>
> 2 - Export the accounts and "transfer" opening balances from 
> Assets and Liabilities (and having to input my Customers and 
> Vendors again)
>
> Anyone care to share their experience? Which seems like a better 
> way to go? Maybe another option?

What I did is basically backup my 2003 books and then do #1 manually.
#2 is a lot of work, because you lose ALL the business settings so
it's much more work than just adding zero-izing transactions to all
your Income/Expense accounts.

Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the reports already
handle begin/end dates so if you don't mind the I/E account balances
growing you don't need to insert the balancing transactions.

> *Second question: (that may be related to the first)
> When I run a P&L report for the last year, (to help me "close the 
> books") some of the columns are not added, it appears just $. 
> (Same thing with balance sheet, account summary reports)

I dont understand -- do you have accounts in multiple currencies?  In
that case, correct, they are not added together.

> Is this behavior related to account opening balances?
> Or is it related to the gtkhtml bug mentioned on this list? 
> (Fedora has three gtkhtml rpms installed)

I have no clue, I'm not sure what you're talking about.  It's
defintely not related to gtkhtml; that's just the display widget.

> Thanks for the help, the tax man is just around the corner .....
>
> gh 

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available