End of Year Accounting procedures

[FireFly]

--- On Sat, 1/1/11, MICHAEL LEWIS <michael.lewis52 at btopenworld.com> wrote:
> Normal accounting practice at the end
> of year is to archive transactions of the year just ended
> and start the new year's ledger with just a brought forward
> figure. There are of course varying practices, but in
> general it is undesirable to clog up current files with ever
> increasing numbers of transactions.
> How do other users deal with the problem of dropping past
> years' transactions at the start of a new year? The FAQs
> section is not very forthcoming.

So, if you look in the archive you'll probably find vast amounts of back and forth about this. Current practice in GNUCash is to use the Close Books functionality, which zeros income and expense accounts, and transfers it to equity, note it doesn't delete any transactions, in fact it ADDS more transactions.

The arguments around it are that in modern computing, why bother deleting transactions, because in all likelihood the volume is low enough that it won't impact much, now the problem here is that IF your volume gets large enough then there isn't much that you can automatically do. It might be interesting to add a "close out year" function, or something like that that would actually create a whole new chart of accounts with the dates opening balances, however, that's something someone would have to code, and right now I certainly don't have time to even contemplate doing it.

Thanks

- James Duerr

E-mail: FireFlys_98 at yahoo.com
---------------------
Discover a lost art - play Marbles. May 2004
www.marillion.com