Starting a new year

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Manfred Jung wrote:

>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.
>
>Can someone please point me to the right way of doing this.
>
>  
>
If, as you said later, you really want to have a new set of books each 
year, unless you have a great many accounts, not particularly difficult. 
You:

1) Do this export of accounts (which has no opening balances)
2) You produce a Balance sheet report as of the date the new books are 
to be opened.
3) You enter all the non-zero account balances. In the old days (pen and 
ink on paper) this would have been done with a single transaction split 
on both sides. But with GnuCash probably best done as a pair of split 
transactions (the "other" or unsplit side of these transactions would be 
"retained equity" or whatever equity account you use to represent that).

Having an automated facility for doing this would be useful if/f the 
books had a great many accounts with non-zero balance. Keep in mind that 
the work of creating automated facilities makes the most sense for 
things that must be done FREQUENTLY and you don't usually open new books 
more than once a year. In other words, development effort (a limited 
resource) probably best spent doing other things. Something that saves 
one minute a day results in much more saved time than something which 
saves a hour once a year.

Michael