Perl script for "closing the books" in a GnuCash file

[Derek Atkins]

Hi Jik,

Jonathan Kamens <jik at kamens.brookline.ma.us> writes:

> I've written a Perl script which parses an XML GnuCash data file,
> archives old transactions into a separate file, and creates "Opening
> Balances" transactions in the original file to reflect the totals of
> the archived transactions.  It's a bit rough around the edges, and
> many of those edges are documented in a comment a the top of the
> script explaining what still needs to be improved, but it does what I
> need to do quite well, albeit a bit slowly -- Perl doesn't parse XML
> quite as fast as GnuCash does.
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1) I gather that this is not functionality that GnuCash currently
>    supports.  Is that correct?

Sort of.  The 1.8 release does not support this kind of functionality,
however the HEAD branch does have some support for book closing.  I
have no idea exactly how complete that feature is at the moment, but
the base code is there.

> 2) Would it be useful for me to post this script here and/or submit it
>    to the GnuCash maintainers for inclusion as a contributed script in
>    the GnuCash distribution?

Never hurts, I suppose..

> jik

-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