coming from Quicken Cashbook

[John Morris]

 I also am in the process of moving 20 years worth of data from Quicken to GnuCash. While opening the application has been slow, it is no slower than opening the PPC Quicken on an Intel Mac under Snow Leopard. I have not run many reports yet, but the rest of the process seems to be reasonably responsive.

 However, I have long recognized that it would be nice to be able to "close" the books periodically and have searched in vain for the procedure. Could you point me in the direction of a more detailed explanation? Ideally, I would like to close the books retroactively because I always need frequent access to data from the last year or so. Would this procedure allow me to close the books as of, say, 2010? That would allow me to keep the most recent information handy while improving reporting performance.

Thanks,
John

On Jul 28, 2014, at 8:28 AM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:

> Could I make a suggestion. I can well understand why you would want to have your historical data accessible from within gnucash WHEN IT IS NEEDED. But I would also expect that such times would be few and far between and so the price (in time) for current bookkeeping rather high. So this is a situation where you possibly COULD ...........
> 
> 1) Run a Balance Sheet Report as of the start of a prior accounting period. Ideally done right at the end of an accounting period (so you might have to the "slow" until then.In this case you would want to have done a "close the books" operation.
> 
> 2) Create a new set of gnucash books using this Balance Sheet for your opening the books data.
> 
> 3) Rename the files (the books) to something meaningful like "Pre 201x" and "Post 201x".
> 
> Now you use the the new set of books to enter current and future transactions and it should be a much smaller and so faster to open file. But if and when you need to refer to the older data you can open that set of books (treat it as "read only" in terms of transactions).
> 
> That is what I would do in your situation. You data (the books) are NOT part of the program and gnucash can handle a number of different sets of books, just open the correct file.
> 
> Michael D Novack