What's your favorite year end method?

[Ron Morse]

I would offer that the Gnucash data file is really pretty compact (three
years worth of stuff for me is still under 300Kb) so I don't feel a
pressing need to split the file.  I do make a copy as I close out each
year, but that's a simple matter of file > save as when I get to the
point that I have reconciled all the accounts that are going to get
reconciled.

Ron Morse
 
On Sun, 2007-12-16 at 17:14 -0500, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> >
> >How do you separate years so the file size stays manageable and so you accounts show a year to date balance?
> >
> >  
> >
> John,
> 
>     I don't know for sure exactly how I will do it (this first year end 
> under GnuCash) but again I would refer to "standard accounting", what 
> you would do were you maintaining the books by hand with pen and ink on 
> paper.
> 
>     Maybe first consider what you might mean by "your accounts show a 
> year to date balance"
> 
>     You have two kinds of accounts, "standing accounts" and "temporary 
> accounts". The former would be of type asset, liability, and equity. 
> Accounts of these types always have a balance "at the moment" (or as of 
> any particular date) but not a YTD balance. On the other hand, the 
> "temporary" income and expense accounts have a balance "for this 
> accounting interval" meaning since the last time that they were closed 
> to equity (aka "closing the books").
> 
>     The process might be easier to understand if we pretend that GnuCash 
> didn't come with the built in capability of generating an 
> "Income-Expense Statement" for a specified interval. The old manual 
> process? A temporary equity account tradiitonally named "Profit and 
> Loss" or "Income Expense Statement" is created and all income expense 
> account closed to here. Then if that was just a quarterly statement or 
> whatever, returned with a transaction such as "balance as of start of 
> Nth quarter" OR if at the end of the fiscal year, closed to equity (the 
> gain or loss amount). That's called "closing the books" as at that point 
> all the temporary ( Income and Expense) accounts all have a zero balance.
> 
> File size is another matetr. I can't see that becoming an issue for us 
> (at most a few hundred transactions a year) but if it were, I would 
> simply copy all the balances into a new copy of the chart of accounts. 
> If you do that, MAKE PERMANENT BACKUPS (like immediately before close, 
> immediately after close). In my case where I plan to leave all the past 
> years' information immediately available (can thus reproduce a report 
> for any date quickly) those same backups serve as verification that 
> "past" data has not been altered.
> 
> Michael
> 
>    
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