Year's end, file size an issue?

[David T.]

Mike--

That is how I have solved the situation in the past. The main problem with this (which I implied but did not outright state in my original reply) is that there is no easy way to tell Gnucash to omit January first in reports. You have to manually change the date each time. This is not odious, but it is annoying. There is no "Previous Year Starting on January 2nd" option for the date range. And yes, you can always save the report with a January 2nd start date, but each year, you'd have to edit the date anyway.

Additionally, the zeroing transactions completely throw off any longer-term reports, which effectively eliminates the reason why you'd keep multiple years' data in the first place--that is, to get longterm trends on different accounts.

So, yours is certainly a viable solution, but I still don't like it, which is why I stopped closing my books.

David

--- On Thu, 1/28/10, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> From: Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>
> Subject: Re: Year's end, file size an issue?
> To: "Jeff Kletsky" <gnucash at allycomm.com>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Date: Thursday, January 28, 2010, 8:51 AM
> Jeff
> 
> > ?
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Jeff is describing a problem that is sometimes solved by
> having a "day that is not a real date" which falls after the
> last fiscal day of one year and before the first fiscal date
> of the next. But when the fiscal year coincides with the
> calendar year easy to use January 1st as the date and simply
> declare that is a date not inside a fiscal year for your
> enterprise.
> 
> That's the solution which I use. The organization's books
> are open for transactions up to and including Dec 31st. The
> books are closed with transactions as of Jan 1st. The next
> year's transactions begin as of Jan 2nd. In other words, I
> am using Jan 1st as the date "not in any year". Since banks
> and the stock market aren't open on Jan 1st, no problem. But
> for those using a different fiscal year that does not have a
> holiday they can use "in between" that won't work.
> 
> Jeff, that does not result in the next year's Income
> Statement getting messed up (just use Jan 2nd as the start
> date; Dec 31st as the end date)
> 
> Michael
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>