close books

[Ken Heard]

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I finally see the point.  I was confusing p & l accounts with assets,
liabilities and equity accounts.  The latter three keep their balances
from year to year.

Mike or Penny Novack wrote, in part:
> I'll try to explain this:
> 
> 1) If your closing transaction(s) are as of 1/1/following year then
>    a) You can run/rerun reports as the end of the previous year
>    b) You won't be able to run the reports for the next year starting
> with 1/1 (will need to use 1/2 for the start). The TITLEs of your
> reports can still be made to say 1/1.
>     This is the choice if you can assume that there will never be an
> external fiscal transaction with data 1/1 (it is a bank holiday after all)

One solution, but I really forget what situation this thread was trying
to address.

> 2) If your closing transaction(s) are as of 12/31
>    a) You must close the books only after you run the year end reports
> and the P&L report ("Income Statement") will not be rerunable.
>    b) You can run the following year starting 1/1 as normal.
> 
> 3) Same if your fiscal year does not coincide with the calendar year but
> in that case you probably won't be able to assume no external fiscal
> transactions on both the last day of the current year and the first day
> of the next.

> What would be NICE would be to allow a "special date" for book closing
> (one no in the real calendar).

How about creating an artificial day after the end of each month, e.g.
December 32?

> If you choose option "2" what I suggest is that you back up the file
> immediately after the year end reports (before "close the books") and
> then a backup up immediately after closing the books. Now you CAN rerun
> the reports if you must.

I would consider such backups essential.

> Michael D Novack, FLMI  (who for quite a few years "babysat" year-end
> processing for one of the world's largest "financials" --- BTW, our shop
> used the "special dates" approach so there was one fiscal date in the
> year on which no external transactions were allowed)

I suggested an artificial date above, but either Dec 31 or Jan 1 could
be used if no external transactions were to be allowed.

One problem I do see with a closing procedure which merely transfers to
 equity accounts only the *balance* in each p & l account rather than
transferring the all p & l transactions *individually*. After a few
years the main accounts file will be very large and consequently take a
long time to open and saved.  Gnucash should really allow some way of
deleting obsolete transactions, all of which would be kept in the annual
back-ups in case they are needed.

Regards, Ken Heard
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