Year end procedure...

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>Out of interest, would this include then (in your opinion) clearing all asset account transactions, and liability account transactions? I assume so because the income/expenses have to be the double side of somewhere. Personally I'd rather "waste" the disk space, but I don't have a vast number of transactions, so I'm not too concerned about the disk space.
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No, a "close the books" operation does not affect the "standing accounts"

Since people seem to be requesting a method for beginning each 
accounting period with new books (sort of like what was traditional back 
in the pen and ink on paper days) here is what I suggest.

a) Create your chart of accounts (the tree structure of accounts) 
WITHOUT entering any balances. Save this somewhere.

b) Forget about "close the books" since Gnucash can generate the "Income 
Statement" report without that (in the old days the temporary account 
into which each income and expense account was closed WAS the "Profit 
and Loss" report). Simply save the books (save that directory) somewhere 
after burning permanent copies sent off for safe keeping.

c) Each new period make a copy of that saved chart of accounts (the 
"empty" set of books) and rename the file according to the period. Open 
this for doing your next period accounting. If you have not yet 
completed the previous period temporarily don't do the "opening 
entries". But as soon as the previous period is compete you can use the 
final "Balance Sheet" to create a transaction (or transactions) to enter 
the initial balances for the standing accounts. If these transactions 
(you might choose do it in TWO split transactions) are dated before any 
of the new period's new transactions will end up appearing in the 
correct order.

d) As you find you need to add new accounts to your books, don't forget 
to add them to that "skeleton". I'd probably choose to do that only once 
a year (wait till the end and then add all new accounts.

e) I would not choose to do this with main books as being able to LOOK 
back at previous period's transactions is useful (how much did we spend 
on fertilizer last year, etc. -- or more to the point, WHEN was that? as 
the total could get from a report). But I do do this with some 
subsidiary books.

Michael D Novack