General Ledger Dump and Year End Closing

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sat May 17 18:44:56 EDT 2014


Theresa wrote:

>Hi all, another year has gone by and once again I'm confronted with the task
>of making my reports appeal to my accountant.  LOL!  Here are my queries:
>1. Does anyone know what is meant by and/or how to print out a "General
>Ledger Dump" that will include the balance forward from last year after the
>books closed for the year, which, if there was something I needed to do to
>"close the books for the year" I know I didn't do it last year.  This report
>is also supposed to contain all the trasactions and monthly balances for
>each account for the period.
>  
>
The report you are looking for goes by the gnucash name "transaction 
report". Set the start and end dates for the year you want (and yes, in 
does monthly totals)

>2.  How does one "close the books for the year"?
>Thanks in advance for any input you can give.  Theresa
>
>  
>
You don't actually have to do this as gnucash can produce the necessary 
report without. But if you accountant does want you to do this (and it 
can be nice when the balances shown for the (temporary) income and 
expense accounts are JUST the balance of transactions for the current 
period) you can use the "close the books feature". That you didn't do it 
yet (for last year) isn't a problem as you can set the date (close as of 
date X).

What I usually do IF what one of my organizations wants this is FIRST 
make a (backup) copy of the books after all the transactions for the 
prior year are in, then close the books (as of that same last dater) and 
rename the file for the coming year. That's what I do in the LOGICAL 
sense because I actually do the reverse. That's because the current file 
already had the right year name. So I make a copy named for the new year 
and close that (before entering any transactions of that new year). Can 
be a bit more involved, first make sure all the EXTERNAL transactions of 
the prior year have been entered, then enter the INTERNAL adjusting 
entries (like depreciation, etc.), then make the copy that will be the 
new year's books and run the close operation on that << please note, I 
have never actually used the built in gnucash "close the books", doing 
it the old fashioned way instead (manually) as that forces me to see all 
the accounts and I can decide if they will still be in use the following 
year >>



Michael D Novack.


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