Year's end, file size an issue?

Jeff Kletsky gnucash at allycomm.com
Thu Jan 28 10:30:50 EST 2010


I have to say I'm glad I have 11 months to figure out what to do at 
year-end. Closing out the books is a lot more "obvious" when the records 
are on a piece of paper. There, at the bottom of one page, are the 
totals for the accounts on the end of the last day of the year. Nice. 
Then, on the same day, but on the next page of the books, are a bunch of 
transactions that just roll up the account totals. So, at the bottom of 
that page, the accounts show year-end totals, with zero balances on the 
income/expense accounts.

Then came computers.

Now where is that "extra page" in the books?

If I close my books on 12/31, then any report I run for last year has 
the year-end roll-up transactions included. Hmmm, in December, I go from 
11 months' accumulated in Income:Salary to zero on the 31st. So my 
income for the month of December is a big negative number?

It isn't any better if I do the roll-up on 1/1 because, although last 
year's books "work out" right for reporting on last year, I've got the 
same kind of mess for this year. I don't know any way to easily post 
transactions on "December 32nd" or "Triskellber 1st" or the like so that 
the old "new page of the journal" idea works nicely in the electronic 
age. Maybe I'm missing a reporting flag somewhere; I'm far from a 
GNUCash expert. Who knows, I might just keep a locked backup of the 
books before roll-up around for reporting.

I'm also glad I've got 11 months to figure out the reports. It's not 
you're accounting experience -- While I enjoyed the ease of use of 
Quicken for reporting (once you turn off the nearly useless pretty pies 
and bars), their underlying financial engine and its UI has huge flaws, 
in my opinion. With GNUCash, the balance seems to be the other 
direction. I prefer data integrity, so I'm here. A good chart of 
accounts, organized to meet your personal needs, makes about half of the 
reports and drill-downs that Quicken provides just be a "natural" part 
of the registers and account summaries. The rest? Ok, a challenge, I'll 
admit, and I know some pretty obscure programming languages. I'm looking 
forward to the new rendering engine and base reports in 2.4 and making 
some of the reports both more physically readable, as well as meaningful 
for everyday tasks (can you say "budget monitoring") on top of the 
year-end printouts that I'll ship off to my tax accountant.

On 1/27/10 10:28 PM, Paul and/or Minna Brown wrote:
> --- On Wed, 1/27/10, David T.<sunfish62 at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>    
>> I believe that trying to use the reports to glean this sort
>> of information is a better way to go--although I will be the
>> first to admit that the reports system can be a challenge.
>>      
> Thanks, David, first of all, for your insight into this issue.  As a Quicken convert, I've only tried to run 2 or 3 different reports in GnuCash, and ultimately ended up just throwing my hands in the air.  Just have not taken the time to figure out what's going on, etc, etc.  I suppose having (IMO) 0 accounting skills isn't helping me any, either. =o)
>
> -paul
>    



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