Archiving question

[Doug Pastorello]

Here is a message about a script I wrote years ago to delete old
transactions. The transaction matching subroutine should be fairly easy
to modify, and may meet your needs.
http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2009-January/027957.html
--Doug.

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 02:29 -0700, Beth Leonard wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 02:13:03PM +1000, lesliek at ozemail.com.au wrote:
> > 
> > What I did, therefore, was to make a copy of my Gnucash data file and rename it. I then opened Gnucash for the purpose of deleting all pre-1 July
> > entries from my current data file. However, I couldn't find a way to delete multiple transactions simultaneously.
> > 
> > Is there such a facility or must I delete entries one by one?
> 
> In the current version of gnucash there is no good way to do this.
> Both items (year-end book closing support, and deleting multiple
> transactions) are known enhancement requests, but both will have
> to wait until after the G2 port is done.
> 
> What I have been doing is: once I am certain I have finished all
> transactions up to year end is I make an archive of that datafile.
> (Finances2004_reconciled.gnucash for example)
> 
> In the current working file, add a close-out transaction to each
> of your income and expense accounts, to bring each total to 0.00.
> For example, if in the previous year you spent $1600.00 on
> Expenses:Auto:Gasoline, you add a transaction "Year End Gasoline"
> that credits Expenses:Auto:Gasoline and debits Equity:Owner's Equity
> for $1600 -- thus zeroing out your gas expenses for the last year,
> and indicating that you got $1600 "poorer" in terms of your equity.
> If you are using the non-accounting labels, Equity:Owner's Equity
> will decrease by $1600, and Expenses:Auto:Gasoline will have a
> rebate of $1600 dated 7/31/05.
> 
> Note that by default if you had gnucash set up the chart of accounts
> for business accounts for you, "Owner's Equity" is called "Retained
> Earnings."  I finally got around to showing my accountant gnucash,
> and she said it should be called Owner's Equity.  She also had a
> few more suggestions for re-arranging which part of the reports
> go where, but I digress.  I should probably write all that up
> in a separate e-mail so everyone can learn from it.
> 
> If you add zeroing transactions like this instead of deleting everything
> from the previous year, you gain the type-ahead for filling transactions
> for the next year, and you also can make reports that show monthly
> expenses over time for example.  The disadvantage is that the
> last month of the year will be a bit off in the graphs, because it
> includes the transfer to the equity account.  There is also a bug in
> that until an account has a non-0 balance, the over-time reports
> assume that it had a 0 balance all along, even if that is not the
> case.
> 
> --Beth 
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> +                             Beth Leonard                          +
> +       O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave              +
> +       O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?        +
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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