End of year close book

[David G. Hamblen]

On 07/08/2013 09:53 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:
> On 8 Jul 2013, at 14:16, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Monday, 7/8/2013 4:34 AM, Chris Henderson wrote:
>>> Anyone?
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Chris Henderson <henders254 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> At the moment I can see the Expense over time report by month. If I close
>>>> the book at the end of year, will I be able to compare expense over time
>>>> from this year to next year month by month or will it only show report for
>>>> the next year? If I don't close the book by the end of this year, will
>>>> expense over time report get bigger and bigger as more years get pile on to
>>>> it?
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to keep my file clutter free but also be able to see records
>>>> over multiple years to get an assessment on progress.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gnucash-user mailing list
>>> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>>> -----
>>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>>
>> Chris,
>> I am not sure why nobody has answered your question yet.  I do not use
>> the Close book function, but my understanding is that it essentially
>> just adds closing transactions to income and expense accounts to zero
>> them out at the end of the business year.  I may be wrong about that.
> Yes, that's what happens.
>
> It has the unfortunate side effect of making it appear that no income nor expenditure occurred during that financial year, because the closing transaction has an explicit date, namely the last day of the financial year.
>
> I've worked around this by ensuring that no income/expenditure transactions are _recorded_ as taking place on 31st March in any year (my year-end). I can then set up income and expenditure reports running from 1st April to 30th March, so that I can compare one year with another.
>
> If I recall correctly, there's been a recent thread relating to this, and to the technical difficulty of making the year end happen immediately after the end of one year (31st March) and immediately before the beginning of the next (1st April)!
>
> Michael
>
>> There is no need to use it to make reports correct as the time interval,
>> where used, can be set to (almost) whatever you want.  You did mention
>> the expense over time report which has a known anomaly that it reports
>> the balances by starting dates rather than ending dates, which is a
>> little different than standard business reports.
>>
>>
Most of the reports have an option to exclude closing transactions; so 
there's no problem with "no income nor no expenditure". For example, on 
the "Profit and Loss" statement, it's the "Entries" page of the 
edit/reports options.