Income Statements - 2 questions

[Mike or Penny Novack]

FireFly wrote:

>--- On Mon, 7/12/10, felix.karpfen at gmail.com <felix.karpfen at gmail.com> wrote:
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>  
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>>I closed my books at the end of the
>>past financial year and started with zero entries under
>>Income and Expenses on 1 July 2010. Out of curiosity, I did
>>a trial run of the "Income Statement" report (which worked
>>perfectly before closing the books).
>>    
>>
>
>Skipping the rest to the potential problem, what date is your close books transactions recorded on? If recorded as July 1st, then it could be that that is causing all the numbers to be off.
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>- James Duerr
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Almost certainly this is the cause,

GnuCash does not provide the capability of "a date that is not a date" 
to use for doing the closing. Ideally you want to have a date for this 
that is AFTER the end of the previous fiscal period but BEFORE the start 
of the next.

Two choices:
1) Use the last date of the fiscal period. But run the report (Income 
Statement) before you close the books. The report dates will be normal 
(no need to edit them in the title line of the report. But the report 
will not be rerunnable later (since at some future time close the books 
will have happened on that date).
2) Assign a date not to be included as a fiscal date. In other words, a 
date on which no external fiscal transactions will be recorded. All 
transactions assigned this date are "adjustments" like close the books. 
The report uses a start date AFTER this date so you may want to edit the 
title line.
NOTE: This is what I do. I use Jan 1st (you want a date that's a 
bank/market holiday) so my year runs Jan 2nd to Dec 31st and Jan 1st 
isn't in any year for Income Statement purposes. NOT a strange way to 
handle the problem. It's how handled where I used to work (one of the 
world's largest financials)

Michael D Novack