Archiving question

[Maf. King]

On Monday 01 Aug 2005 05:13, lesliek at ozemail.com.au wrote:
> I write from Australia.
>
> Our tax year ends on 30 June.
>

More sensible than 5th April, as it is here in the UK,,,

> Because of that, I've gotten into the habit with my Windows finance
> management program of archiving my data file when all transactions in it up
> to 30 June in any given year have been reconciled, which usually happens by
> today (1 August).
>
> I wanted to do the same in Gnucash, but couldn't find any archiving
> facility.
>

Gnucash presently has no facility for automatically "closing books" at year 
end.


> What I did, therefore, was to make a copy of my Gnucash data file and
> rename it. I then opened Gnucash for the purpose of deleting all pre-1 July
> entries from my current data file. However, I couldn't find a way to delete
> multiple transactions simultaneously.
>
> Is there such a facility or must I delete entries one by one?
>

There is no way to delete multiple transactions at the same time.  What you 
can do is start a new, empty copy of your accounts tree, set the opening 
balances and use that from 1st July.

Open your "last-year" accounts file, do a File->export (save the export as 
something like myaccs-05-06.xac)

Now, open the newly exported file, and you will have an empty tree.  GO 
through each of your asset/liability accounts and set an opening balance on 
the 30th June (should be the same as each account's closing balance in the 
"old" year)  Transfer is to equity:opening balances (in the default GC tree)

Then put in all your transactions from 1st July. (if they are already in the 
"old" file, then you may prefer to delete them from there for the sake of 
completeness.  I'd rather delete 1 month than 12!)

Or the other approach is to not do year-splitting, and use the date ranges in 
the GC reports to list only the relevant data. That way, you can easily 
compare one year to another (eg. how much did I spend last july compared to 
this july)  You could always do an extra backup of your data file and call it 
"year-end-05-backup.xac" or similar.

HTH,
Maf.