Closing the books, Opening Balance & Profit & Loss

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Colin Scott wrote:

>It is safest (and easiest to see what is going on) when closing the books to :-
>
>a)  ensure that all txns for the closing year have been posted with dates no later than the year end date - say 31st December.
>
>b)  close the books on the following day - 1st January
>
>c)  ensure that all txns for the new year are posted with date later than the book-closing day - so 2nd January onwards.
>
>Working this way you can see (and go back to!) all your figures from *before* you closed the books, then see what the effect is of closing the books, then have a clean new year from the following day.  This may be slightly artificial, but it makes it very much easier to fix any errors you come across that are highlighted by your balance sheet and P&L reports, and means that you don't have to keep the books closed to the new year's txns whilst you deal with the fall-out from the previous year!
>  
>
If you CAN'T do it this way (you have no date on which there cannot be 
external transactions -- say your fiscal year is July 1st to June 30th 
and you have transactions on both days).

a) Make a backup of the file immediately before the close named to 
something like "preclosefyeJune302011"
b) Make a backup of the file immediately after the close named something 
like "aftclosefyeJune302011"  The close date would (date of the close 
transactions) would be 20110630.

Now if you need to rerun reports for the fiscal year ending June 30, 
2011 you can. Simply have gnucash open the pre close file.

Notice you can do this even if your close isn't done in real time but 
the pre close save should be done before any transactions for the 
following fiscal year have been entered (logically in real time). But in 
that case be very careful using the right balances to the close (perhaps 
the automated close will do that all by itself -- I don't use it so 
don't know).



Michael