How to close an accounting year and open a new accounting year

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Mon Apr 23 12:30:03 EDT 2012


Shokster <ashok.sinha at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm also dealing with investments and accounting in the Indian financial
> framework. Largely, it's similar to any other country. 
>  
> I'm using GnuCash for personal accounting. I've used paper based books for
> my accounts for the past 20 years. Now I'm converting to GnuCash and running
> in parallel this entire financial year. 
>  
> About closing books - 
> 1. To close books would mean generating a pdf report that cannot be changed
> for the time period Apr1 to Mar 31. 

This part is easy and can be done today.  Generate a report, Print to
PDF.  Viola.

> 2. Once the report is generated, don't mess with numbers the previous
> financial year. If changes need to be made, make them in the current year.
> Once a pdf report has been generated at the end of the financial year, then
> in principle, those numbers should be locked for editing - this is something
> that needs to be kept in mind all the time. 

This part is harder.  There is no way to guarantee read-only access to
the data.  Anyone who says otherwise is selling you snake oil.
Seriously.  Someone who wants to change the data can.  If nothing else,
they could rebuild GnuCash without the date-check code in order to
modify the data.

If you want real verification, write your data file to a write-once
media like a CD-ROM and store it in a safe deposit box.

Having said that, Christian Stimming has been adding some code to the
development branch that adds some write-protection to historical data.
I haven't explored it yet, but I've seen the patches fly by.

> I've also been thinking about how long should I go on adding to that one
> single GnuCash file. The file size will keep growing. At the moment, I'm
> quite happy with the file size <1MN and hence I can imagine using it at
> least for a few years before file size becomes an issue. 

Yes, the file will continue growing.  I've been using GnuCash for a
decade and have everything in one file.  Except for a few particular
reports I don't see performance issues due to data size.

Obviously YMMV.

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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