close books

John A. Mason jmason at masondrywall.com
Thu Dec 9 11:59:03 EST 2010


Good points by the way, I need to clarify something.

The two books that I have used SQL statements to "clean up" were
straight forward accounts with no stocks, single currencies, and
relatively few assets or liabilities. I always handled the
asset/liability balance issue by using a "consolidation" method...
meaning I don't really just delete all the transactions. Instead I sum
up all the transactions older than date X and make a new, single
transaction for that amount prior to deleting the transaction. Sometimes
this means I have to use a hidden equity account to keep all the splits
right, but like I said, I haven't tried it on any complicated books. I
wouldn't recommend doing it at all for anyone doing alot of complicated
accounts with dividends, currencies, etc. etc.

And in those cases of extreme complications, i would simply suggest
using the sqlite backend (or other db backend if they ever get to
implementing them) and just FILTER out reconciled transactions or the
like so it doesn't bog down things when you are viewing the account
ledgers.


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


On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 10:26 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Ken Heard <ken at heard.name> writes:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> You have to do more than just remove old transactions.  You need to make
> sure your Asset and Liability balances stay correct.  Moreover, you have
> to be careful because some transactions (even old ones) cannot be
> removed (e.g. a stock dividend income transaction) in order to maintain
> a proper basis.
> 
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
> -derek
> 



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