Trying to work out an archival scheme

Mark snark at pobox.com
Sat Jan 3 17:38:59 EST 2009


Yeah, that's probably the correct way (in accounting principles)... but
it really isn't what I am looking for.  The issues (assuming I
understand what you are saying):
o takes a ridiculous amount of manual work to recreate existing accounts
tied to opening balances
o makes taxes difficult... if you sell a stock, you have to plow through
multiple files to figure out the details of purchase price/date.
o breaks my own internal hacks (which I did not really spell out, but
alluded to).  I have gnucash tied into cacti, such that I get a large
number of very detailed graphs.  The graphs are always up-to-date and
have historical data going back 10 years.  In order to keep those
working, I need assets to always be on the books (stocks, etc) and I
need income/expense transactions for the last 5 years.

What I am really trying to sort out is how to purge (and archive) the
uninteresting transactions.  The amount I paid for my utilities is
interesting over the past 5 years... but going back further than that
becomes minutia that I'd rather move out of the way for efficiency sake.
 (Yes, I know parsing the XML will break in future releases.  I guess I
will deal with that when it happens.)


John R. Carter, Sr. wrote:
> I "think" the best way to handle archives is to close the books
> periodically and start up a new file. The "current" file retains all
> transactions from the date of closing the books. The older file is what
> is archived. You can open any archived file to get data from it if needed.
> 
> These are my thoughts. I am not a gnucash developer.
> 
> 
> -- 
> John Carter
> 


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