Trouble setting accounting period

[Mike or Penny Novack]

ANTHONY NELSON wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>My CPA wants me to run some reports from last year, which for me ended 9/30/2012. 
>
>When I go to the Accounting Period screen and set the accounting period properly the change does not seem to take.  See screen shot:
>
>
>
>When I run a report or even get out of GnuCash Preferences and go back in the accounting period is back to the current year rather than what I have set.  I've tried to save the file, quit out of GnuCash, and go back in, but that does not work either.
>
>Also, I notice on Preferences screens there is a "Close" button, but not a "Save" button. 
>
>How can I get around this problem?
>  
>
By learning how and where you set the date range when running a report?

When new with some piece of software early on you want to learn how it 
works. In the case of gnucash reports, you want to learn how you specify 
all the options you want in effect for THIS run of the report. There are 
LOTS of options. These include things like what accounts to include, how 
deep to show nesting, how and what to subtotal, what you want the 
reports called and what title should display, AND (very important in 
your case) the DATES for this running of this report.

If you had thought about for a moment you might have realized that 
needing to (re)produce reports for times not the current real time would 
be so common that this wouldn't be something you'd want in global 
preferences.

OK -----
1) run a report (for the moment ignore that the dates aren't what you want)
2) Edit => Report Options
   This brings up for you a menu where you have pages of options you can 
change. I suggest in the learning phase you go through this and find out 
about ALL of the things you can change. Among them will be the effective 
dates for the running of this report (change those, apply, and the 
report will change).

Michael