Trouble setting accounting period

David Carlson david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 5 21:13:21 EST 2014


On 2/5/2014 4:52 PM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
>
>> Yes, that will work but what Anthony, myself and others are doing is
>> also correct practice. It's just that it's no longer working.
>>
>> Reports we want to produce are for the 'accounting period' which only
>> needs to be set once per year - or at least that used to be the case
>> until something broke in the past year, probably with the introduction
>> of 2.6.0.
>>
>> I suggest you don't be quite so patronising when next you respond to a
>> request for assistance.
>>  
>>
> Sorry
>
> But maybe you will explain HOW just setting "accounting period" could
> decide the date for a report in general.
>
> Let's take Balance Sheet as our example. How does the computer
> (knowing only what YEAR you want that report for) read your mind to
> figure out what DAY in that year you wanted that report for.
>
> Or take an Income Statement. Did you want that for start of year till
> today (when you are running the report) or as of the end of the last
> quarter a few days ago?
>
> It is only in the very special case that you were ALWAYS running in
> "real time" that you could get away with not specifying the effective
> dates for a report. Now before I retired I did large financial system
> software for one of the largest financials in the world. Not only were
> we not always running a program in real time but some of the hardest
> errors to find/correct were from when there was a real time dependency
> (because does NOT reproduce until/unless you remember that and correct
> for the fact that you are now running later).
>
> Always explicitly specify dates!
>
> Michael
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I will take Graham's side on this debate.  As he points out, many
reports have a date option to relate to the current or previous
accounting period.  When these options are selected and the report is
memorized, the report dates slide along the calendar with the accounting
period, and there is no need to change the date selection a year later
because the calendar did that for you. 

I do agree that it is important to read the date printed at the top of
the report before accepting it willy-nilly, but we always do that, don't we?

David C


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