Problems Running Report for Previous Year

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
> Just a point of clarification; the Balance Sheet report is definitely
> a report "as of some date", but it DOES ask for a "start date" so
> that it can compute the "retaining earnings".  This is due to the
> fact that gnucash doesn't really have true Period support and doesn't
> "close the books".

Well -- that's the sort of things I have been investigating during my 
"evaluation".

a) There's no "period support" in the sense that you can't LOCK the 
books against change entires affecting the past. You can of course 
"burn" a copy of the books as they stand at any point in time which can 
act as a verification that no change affecting a prior date has been 
made. This would have to be done in any case if the person using GnuCash 
to keep the books was a programmer (if you imagine any date lock would 
keep one of us pros from altering the data a little naive).

b) There is no AUTOMATED close process. That doesn't prevent somebody 
using GnuCash from doing a formal closing of all income and expense 
accounts for the time period to the special (temporary) equity account 
usually titled something like "Profit and Loss" and then this account 
closed to the main "retained equity" as the gain or loss for that time 
period. You would do this AFTER your final "Income Statement" report for 
that time period and a printout of that report sitting in front of you a 
great aid in doing the three (two split) closing transactions).

I have most certainly been testing the ability to (re)produce reports 
for prior time periods and all seems to be working as I would have 
expected. The lack of an automated close isn't a big deal for me as only 
tens, not thousands, of income/expense accounts. But yes, would be a 
time saver when lots of accounts to be closed.

Michael

PS --- For the purpose for which I am evaluating GnuCash (accounting for 
a non-profit) the mode in which prior time period data is available is 
useful. Although I haven't gotten around to this yet, when designing the 
custom reports, will be doing some to compare and/or show side by side 
different time periods (somewhat standard practice for the financial 
reports of non-profits -- "how are we doing this year compared to last 
year").