close books

[John A. Mason]

One way that I use GnuCash and the Close Books tool is to not have ANY
transactions on December 31st. I move them all to December 30th. Then
all reports I do end on December 30th for the year. That way December 31
is ALL my close books transactions. That means starting January 1, all
my reports work beautifully. Then I simply set my End of Period settings
for the year to end on December 30 (and yes, also set them to start on
January 1st... that means December 31st "never happened"... or in the
words of the skipper penguin from Madagascar.... "You didn't see
anything....")

Then my reports are run from beginning of period to end of period (jan 1
to dec 30) and I never "see" those zeroing transactions. PLUS, my jan 1
are always back at $0.00. 


Now, every so often (I use the new version 2.3.15 with sqlite3 files,
not the XML gnucash format of old) I will use the command line to
execute a query removing old transactions (5 years old or so). Nobody
cares after about 5 years... and surely anything that's life or death
can be researched via banks, stores, etc. But really, since I'm using
the sqlite database formats, having a 20MB file doesn't cause a problem.
So I could leave essentially 20 years of data in there and it wouldn't
be an issue. But it also means you can use other sqlite access programs
to manipulate the data or even fix a problem, or in my case, sum the old
transactions in to a single transaction and remove the old ones so that
my accounts aren't 500k+ transactions long!

-- 
John A. Mason
Director Systems Administration
The Mason Family of Companies



--- On Tue, 11/30/10, Ken Heard <ken at heard.name> wrote:

> From: Ken Heard <ken at heard.name>
> Subject: Re: close books
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 2:31 PM
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> 
> Surely if you ran "close books" on the first day of the new
> fiscal year
> rather than the last day of the old one, for comparative
> reporting
> purposes you would have the full figures of the old year
> complete to the
> last day?  On the first day of the new year all the
> profit and loss
> accounts would have zero balances.

But including the zeroing transaction in any report will throw your numbers off. If you have $1200 of Electric expenses in 2009, you will have a $1200 zeroing transaction on January 1 (or December 31, etc.), which will throw off the figure for the month of which it is a part. Month to month, you'll have $100--until that ZTM (zeroing transaction month), when you'll have -$1100. Yuck.

> 
> Does or will gnucash allow reports for comparative purposes
> to pull
> balances from the same accounts as of different dates,
> e.g., end of one
> month compared with the end of the previous month, with
> differences
> absolute and relative (percentage change for example)?

To give the usual line, with a little character: "if you build it, they will come." Gnucash reporting is based on Scheme, where (I am told) you can slice, dice and even julienne your data to your heart's content. Unfortunately, no one has sliced or diced the data into such a report as of yet. 

It would seem to me that it might be possible to build a report that included a Zeroing Date option; said option would specify which date should be removed from reports, thus restoring sanity when you've Zeroed your expense and income accounts. As I am not the Scheming type (I might even go so far as to add that I am Guile-less), please don't wait for me to code the solution. I am not a programmer.

;)

David 

> 
> As for equity accounts, they are carried forward from year
> to year, as
> are asset and liability accounts.  You can find
> information about the
> role and purpose of equity accounts either on the web or in
> books such
> as "Accounting for Dummies".  If the latter you have
> the edition which
> applies to your country or state.
> 
> Ken Heard
> 
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