close books

[Phil Longstaff]

Did you close income and expenses to the same account or different accounts?  If 
the same account, the income and expense will offset.  If different accounts, 
what I would do is structure my accounts:

Equity
    Retained Earnings
        Income
        Expense

Retained Earnings is the term used for businesses.  I'm not sure if there's a 
better term for home use.  Having separate Income and Expense accounts allows 
you to see total income or expenses for an extended period, but at the Retained 
Earnings level (e.g. in a report), it will show the difference.

 Phil
---------
I used to be a hypochondriac AND a kleptomaniac. So I took something for it.




________________________________
From: Dennis Powless <claven123 at gmail.com>
To: Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Sent: Wed, December 1, 2010 8:29:29 AM
Subject: Re: close books

I say this because the equity accounts are in the hundreds of
thousands and rising.  I don't have anywhere near that much equity in
anything.  I think the number is way, way off.

I was trying to do just that, simplify the picture.  The expense
accounts were huge numbers also, as is the income.  So, I was tying to
get them to real numbers.


Dennis

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Fred Bone <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> On 30 November 2010 at 11:43, Dennis Powless said:
>
>> I've went into each of the expense accounts and entered a zero out
>> transaction to equity:retained earnings for each year.  This, from
>> what I've been reading is similar to closing the books.  And quite
>> reversible if I ever should need to use that data for reports.  Is
>> this acceptable and will it mess things up in other areas?
>
> That is exactly what the "close books" action does.
>
>> Now, what do I
>> do about the huge equity accounts?  Do the same to those?  Zero them out
>> somehow.
>
> You don't want to zero the equity accounts. They represent your current
> position, or at least your position as at last time you closed the books.
>
> (Well, you might want to enter transfers among them, reducing some sub-
> accounts to zero, to simplify the picture, but that's not quite the same
> thing).
>
>
_______________________________________________
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.