What's your favorite year end method?

[Donald Allen]

We're two people, normally active financially -- we have bills, we buy
stuff, we invest, have bank accounts, credit cards, etc. I have 10
years and more worth of transactions and quotes in my gnucash file,
and compressed, it's a little under 1.8 Mb, about 19 Mb uncompressed.
With processors and disks such as we have today (and I'm not willing
to predict when this is going to stop getting better), the equipment
doesn't even begin to break a sweat. gnucash comes up quickly, all
normal processing (other than certain reports) happens essentially
instantaneously (on any one of my three laptops -- a TP T60, a TP G41
and a Toshiba Libretto and my wife's TP Z60). Since we're running on
yesterday's super-computers, my approach to year-end is to do nothing.
If I want to see yearly income statements or balance-sheets as of a
certain date, I do it with reports, some of which I generate with a
separate Python program I'm working on that reads and processes the
gnucash xml file (and re our current discussion, it presently takes
less than 30 seconds on the T60 to uncompress and parse the gnucash
file, process it and generate an income statement, a balance sheet,
and an unrealized gains report) and generates a latex file for textual
reports and (soon) gnuplot and .csv files for graphical reports. If
this program ever reaches the point where I think it can be useful to
anyone other than me (and I have the time to document and support it)
and people want it, I'll share it with the gnucash community.

/Don

On Dec 16, 2007 7:29 PM, Ron Morse <rbmorse at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnucash-user mailing list
> > gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> > -----
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>