Starting a new year

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sun Apr 20 14:05:18 EDT 2008


Derek Atkins wrote:

>hi,
>
>Quoting Manfred Jung <mjung at ccm.org.za>:
>
>  
>
>>Hi I'm new to GnuCash, yet I have entered one financial year worth of
>>transactions in the program. Now I have to start the new year. I
>>seareche for documentation all afternoon but seem not to find what I need.
>>
>>Some how it must produce a new file with the old balances but without
>>the transactions. How to do that. I tried to export the accounts but
>>then there are no opening balances. I have tried to "close book" but
>>then the old transacctions are still there.
>>    
>>
>
>Why do you feel you need this?  GnuCash is perfectly happy to report
>purely on the year, so unless you have a specific reason there's no
>cause to start a new file every year.  You are correct that the current
>book closing is just a simple helper to zero-ize the Income and Expense
>accounts, but it does not remove the transaction history.
>
I faced this exact problem. In my case I wanted the old transactions to 
be READ accessible (for reference) but not to be alterable. Being a 
person quite capable of rolling my own code, I did not consider asking 
for a means within GnuCash to "lock" closed books (since I WOULD be able 
to alter them in spite of any locks in the "official" version of GnuCash 
-- my version would override these or otherwise ignore the locking). 
What I did, after the closed books for the year had been accepted by the 
organization as "final version" was to BURN two copies and then entrust 
one of these to another officer of the organization. I case any question 
later arose about "alteration", a byte by byte compare of the data not 
in my custody with the data in my custody could demonstrate that this 
had not been done.


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