how to begin a new year

[Alex Aycinena]

Agnes,

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 9:04 AM, Ken Owen <mkenowen at bellsouth.net> wrote:

>  On 4/15/2014 10:52 AM, Alex Aycinena wrote:
>
> I don't know who you are or why you are writing to me with such a cryptic
> note out of the blue. I can only guess that it may have something to do
> with gnucash, since I am involved with that but you don't mention that, so,
> who knows?
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 7:59 AM, Ken Owen <mkenowen at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> Please help me to start today (April 15) with my accounts that have 2013
>> data through today and only use the transactions of this year. I can filter
>> by date, but the reports show total for both years.
>> Thanks for your help
>> Agnes Owen
>>
>
>  Oh, sorry.
> Your name was the first on the documentation of gnucash.  I made an
> assumption.
> I appreciate your response-any thoughts would be helpful in restarting my
> accounts for 2014 w/o losing data up to today.
> Thanks
>
>  This is the second question I've received like this in the last few
days, with no context - probably for the same reason.

As I responded to that e-mail, there is a very active gnucash-user mailing
list which should be used for questions like this. I reply to you now, with
a copy to the list. You should go to www.gnucash.org to subscribe to the
list. You can also manage your own subscription from there (like if you
decide later you want to un-subscribe, you can do it yourself).

There are a number of reasons you should ask questions on the list:
- you are more likely to get a response from several people looking at your
questions rather than just the one person (who may be away, or no longer
involved with gnucash, or to busy to respond, or in a bad mood, etc.).
- there may be someone else who is better positioned to give a good answer
than the person you otherwise may choose to ask
- other people who may have similar issues will benefit from you questions
and the answers you get

Also, from monitoring the list you will learn a lot as you go on using
gnucash from other people's questions. You can even contribute responses to
other people's questions that you know the answer to.

Most users don't expect to be directly contacted with questions.

But you are encouraged to ask any question you want on the list, as long as
it is pertinent to gnucash, and I think you will find that many other users
are willing to give good advice freely.

I'm not sure I quite understand your question. While gnucash does have a
'close books' feature that was added to mimic the activity performed with
manually maintained books, it is not really needed to use gnucash across
multiple accounting periods. Just keep entering transactions, reconciling
statements, etc., as you go. The reports, in general, should allow you to
select date ranges that they cover and just handle everything correctly.
(If not, then they need to be fixed, but so many other people use them,
that that is not likely to be the case, in general.)

Can you be more focused with your question, please? Which report(s) are you
having troubles with? What are you trying to accomplish that is not working
for you? Why do you think you will be 'losing data up to today' unless you
do something special to start the new year? Or do you just have the
impression that each year's data should be in separate gnucash files (which
is not the case)?

I would like to point out that the Tutorial and Concepts Guide, which is
provided with the product (and is also available online), is very useful
for understanding how to use gnucash. Have you studied that?

Also, there is a frequently-asked-questions page available through
www.gnucash.org that you should look at, if you have not yet.


Regards,

Alex