Budgets and closing the books

[Shane Litherland]

Hi all, 

a belated comment on closing books - I believe Colin's initial post
kinda highlighted why bigger businesses have cut-off dates sometimes a
coupla weeks before EoFY for all receivables/payables to be on the
accountant's desk and being entered for closing.. but that doesn't solve
his issue does it?!

I too, have txns up to the EoFY, sometimes also with e.g. cheques or
credit card amounts for those txns not being processed by bank until
after that date so relate to your predicament.

Partly because of this, and also because I don't like 'fudging', I don't
have a 'clear' day in the gnucash accts for just doing closing etc.

I haven't used the budget tool enough to find such glitches, nor do I
use the closing books tool.

I still do a 'closing' of a manual kind - posting private apportionment,
pay/zero annual 'tax owed' account, transferring certain funds to equity
- but not all accounts. for example, I don't close all business expense
accounts or cheque account then re-open with new balances etc in new FY.

For the accounts where I do a 'closing' transaction, I also want to run
reports, like Colin mentioned, and have such closing amounts sometimes
mucking up the report totals. What I sometimes do is two entries, a
'closing' and 'reversing' transaction, on the last day of the FY. when I
want to view pre-closing info, I can change 'reversing' total to 0, then
back again, as required, without getting too lost in closing/unclosing
processes. It also keeps the adjustments from interfering with the start
of the new FY :-)

I still have the issue that in some reporting outputs, my
closing/reversing will show as opposing amounts in the debit/credit
columns. That is fine in that the grand total is correct, but the totals
for debit/credit columns then have that amount included in both, rather
than just removing it from the relevant column. For these parts, what I
sometimes resort to is a calculator and pen to put notes on the printed
report, or i copy the report info to a spreadsheet where I can change
e.g. the closing/reversing amount from a 'credit' to a 'negative
debit' (i.e. swap which column it is in on the spreadsheet, to 'cancel
out' the matching amount) - then the credit/debit totals show me the
totals I want with closing/adjustment amounts taken care of.

I did try a few times to put such closing/adjustment values into gnucash
as a negative figure in the column I wanted adjusted (credit or debit)
but gnucash was too smart for me, and automatically changed it to a
positive value in the other column.

So maybe my approaches might give you some ideas. As I mentioned, I
don't use the closing tool so if you do, that might influence how you
can go about things. I might one day look more into the closing function
but when I started gnucash that was a young tool and i was learning
gnucash and felt doing little manual steps helped me understand it
better. It also let me see/report across financial years for certain
accounts a bit easier. For all I know though, the closing tool might now
be doing a better job than my manual methods.. ;-)

Regards,
Shane.