close books

[Ken Heard]

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John A. Mason wrote:
> 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. 

Another possibility -- already suggested, I think -- is to use Jan 1 for
this purpose, which is a holiday in many parts of the world (hangover
recovery day?) and run the fiscal year from 2 Jan to 31 Dec.

> 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!

I easily have aleady 500 transactions for each of the two years I have
been using gnucash; so growth of the main file is a concern.  I have yet
to close a year; so I have no experience yet of closing.  I plan however
on the last day of the year to copy the main transactions file before
closing to another file, thereby to preserve intact that year's
transactions.  I would then close on December 31 of the old year in the
main file.

I would however in time like to remove from main file all the
transactions older than two years, and thereby reduce its size.   In
sqlite would it be possible to do easily, as I understand is what you
are suggesting in the last sentence of your post quoted above?

Another useful enhancement would be ability to retain somewhere in the
main file only the closing balances of each account at the end of each
fiscal year to use in reports for comparisons between years and in
budget preparation.

Regards, Ken Heard


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