ending off books

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 7:08 AM, Chris Bester
<chrisbester at cybersmart.co.za>wrote:

>  In Patel, Quick Books, Brilliant etc., your program automatically
> does an end of year.  Your books are not in effect closed off and stopped,
> it does carry on.  However, it automatically starts a new year with all the
> ending balances of the previous year appearing as opening balances ,for the
> new year.  They all then have a continuous facility, for whenever you want
> to recall information, from the previous year.  The advantage of this is;
> that there is no chance of contaminating your present books with that of
> the
> previous year.
>
>
Maybe it would be helpful to describe exactly what you mean when you say
"contaminating your present books with that of the previous year."

If you actually mean "contaminating your PREVIOUS years' books by editing
an older transaction," then yes, it can happen, but if you have reconciled
the account, GnuCash (by default) warns you before allowing you to change
any reconciled transaction in that account.

This can be helpful since GnuCash gives you the ability to add annotations
or other details to previous years' transactions when you need to. The dark
side is that you can also (intentionally or not) change numbers that affect
balances and totals, but the developers have decided it's better to warn
you than to pretend this kind of manipulation is impossible.

If you need to certify each years' books, then one method is to print the
relevant reports (to paper and/or digital media) and have the paper (or
media) legally certified and/or stored outside your control.


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