new user of Gnucash - questions

[Dale Alspach]

This is a little too strong a statement. Bookkeeping or accounting occurs in a 
context and that legal or business context may require closing and the 
software may implement it. (Disclaimer: I am not an accountant. This is based 
on my experience .)

----------
 Elizabeth Dodd wrote:

Modern computerised accounting does not have any end of month or end of
year close of books. "Closing Books" at end of year is still popular
but its not a necessary part of computerised bookkeeping. Certainly you
can enter transactions continuously and perform the end of year
functions weeks or months later.
Gnucash does have a close books function for the end of the financial
year.
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Computer accounting system can have such book closing and it is particularly 
necessary when the system has multiple users and reporting requirements, e.g., 
to the state or federal government. Such systems may lock all transactions prior to 
the closing date so that what has been reported is exactly what is in the 
accounting system. This may happen in multiple stages. At the first stage data 
entry for transactions in the closed period by bookkeeping personnel 
may be blocked and only 
privileged users can still make changes, e.g., the books go to the 
auditor and the auditor may require certain corrections and adjusting entries. 
After the audit is completed no one makes changes and the audited statements 
are reported.

This type of behavior is implemented in QuickBooks. The transactions from the 
closed period can be password protected. 

In addition even for small accounting 
systems this prevents accidental alteration of transactions from the past. One 
can waste a lot of time looking for a problem in the recent transactions when 
in fact what happened was that you were looking at an old transaction a made 
a slip with keyboard/mouse and rewrote the distant past.

There are also computing motivations for locking transactions. The software does 
not have to examine the locked transactions and period 
(for most computations), it can work relative to the last closing point.

Dale Alspach