close books

Dennis Powless claven123 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 30 15:08:40 EST 2010


I haven't experimented with the reports part yet, but am planning this.

It's nice to see the balances for the year instead of thousands and
thousands....

I guess I will play with it and see what works.

I'm not sure I 'get' the equity account and it's function.  Will have
to read up on that some more.

Thanks.



On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 2:54 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It sounds like you've manually done what the Tools->Close books option does. You might want to look at that routine, as it does it all in one fell swoop. It also closes out income accounts.
>
> As for the Equity account, I don't think that it's supposed to be zeroed out, since it shows how your enterprise is doing overall (IANAA, though).
>
> Using the Close books option, you'll see the number go up more slowly, since the income zeroing part will offset the expenses to some extent.
>
> Closing the books has upsides and downsides. The big upside is that your account balances in the Chart of Accounts reflect current year amounts for expenses and income. The big downside is that any multi-year reports will be thrown off by the zeroing transaction(s). Since you can make custom reports that include a selection of accounts and cover any time period you want (like, YTD, say), I've decided not to close the books on any of my accounts.
>
> HTH,
> David
>
> --- On Tue, 11/30/10, Dennis Powless <claven123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Dennis Powless <claven123 at gmail.com>
>> Subject: close books
>> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> Date: Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 8:43 AM
>> I've went into each of the expense
>> accounts and entered a zero out
>> transaction to equity:retained earnings for each
>> year.  This, from
>> what I've been reading is similar to closing the
>> books.  And quite
>> reversible if I ever should need to use that data for
>> reports.  Is
>> this acceptable and will it mess things up in other
>> areas?  Now, what
>> do I do about the huge equity accounts?  Do the same
>> to those?  Zero
>> them out somehow.
>>
>> Thanks,
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