Has anyone installed the GnucashEditor (view & edit GnuCash Files)?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Ian K wrote:

>I believe the 'Close books' functionality that is being referred to is the
>ability to delete transactions prior to a specified date, replacing them
>with 'Opening Balance' transactions.
>I know that has been requested before since a lot of users don't like the
>idea that there is no way to stop their data files growing endlessly, with
>the consequence of the slow-down in loading times/report running etc.
>
>  
>
That's NOT what "close books" does.

In traditional pen and ink on paper bookkeeping they sometimes opened a 
new Journal for the new time period but the Ledger accounts usually 
waited till their volumes were close to full (the books were actual 
bound books of pre-ruled ledger paper and the journal was a bound book 
of pre-ruled journal paper). In the case of GnuCash the journal is 
implicit, only the ledger accounts are real.

If you are concerned about growing file size, following "close the 
books" open a new set of books. Those doing this will probably want to 
keep handy a "blank" chart of accounts file (all the accounts, no 
transactions, all zero balance). Then following "close the books" run a 
Balance Sheet report which will show all the Asset, Liability, and 
Equity accounts; you can do this with an option to ignore all accounts 
of zero balance. You then make a copy of that empty chart of accounts to 
serve as the books for the new period and enter an "open the books" 
transaction using that Balance Sheet report for all accounts and their 
balances (it would be a transaction in balance because the balance sheet 
is in balance).

Michael D. Novack

PS: You MIGHT want to request of the developers that they provide this 
operation; open a new set of books from an old set (copy all accounts of 
the old books and an opening transaction made up of all non-zero balance 
accounts. Otherwise, while to do this manually is some work, remember 
its something you would do just once in an accounting period. In terms 
of time saving, anything that the developers can do that save even just 
a few seconds on an operation that you do thousands of times during an 
accounting period is more time savings than automating something that 
might take many minutes but you do just once.