Balance sheet after using "Close book"?

[Soren Hansen]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 06:16:15AM -0400, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
>> I'm wanting to create a balance sheet of some sort, so that I can see
>> the totals of each of my accounts at the end of last year. The
>> balance sheet does that, but if I've used the "Close book"
>> functionality, all the accounts' totals will be 0. Is there a way to
>> generate a balance sheet that somehow "subtracts" the transactions
>> generated by "Close Book"? I'm using gnucash 2.2.9.
> Something very wrong here. A "Balance Sheet" report  should be showing
> just the "standing accounts" (types asset, liability, equity) and not
> the temporary accounts of types like "income" and "expense" that were
> zeroed out by the close the books operation.

Thanks for your quick response.

Sorry, please apologise my poor use of the terminology.  I'll try to
phrase my question without using terms that clearly have very specific
meanings.

What I want is an overview of the totals of all of my acounts as a means
to provide me with an overview of how much money I had in the bank at
the end of the year, how much money I spent on hardware, on hotels, on
travels, etc., as well as my liabilites. Everything, really. If I choose
the "Balance Sheet" report and set the date to December 31, I get
exactly what I want until I use the "Close Book" facility, at which
point of course my income and expense accounts are zeroed.

I just stumbled upon the "Trial Balance" report, which seems to let me
filter out the transactions from the "Close Book" function. That /looks/
like what I need. I need to double check that I've understood it
correctly, though.

> When you run a "Balance Sheet" report before closing the books the NET
> of all the temporary accounts of equity (income and expense accounts)
> appears as net gain of loss for the period.

Yes.

> Did you mean that you wanted an Income Statement from before you
> closed the books? That's easy. Just make the effective end date of
> that report immediately before the date of the close the books.

I have real transactions dated December 31st. The "Close Book"
transactions are also dated December 31st.

> There IS (can be) a problem and it has been discussed. If your fiscal
> activity takes place every day of the year the lack of a "day that is
> not a day" to use for the date to close the books is an annoyance. In
> the case of my organizations I can assign Jan 1 to that purpose (any
> "bank holiday" would do) simply by choosing not to write any checks
> with that date --- so for my organizations no outside fiscal activity
> takes place Jan 1.

Ah, yes, I suppose that would work.

-- 
Soren Hansen <soren at linux2go.dk>
Systems Architect, The Rackspace Cloud
Ubuntu Developer