Balance Forward from previous year and closing books

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Maf. King wrote:

>Hi,
>
>When I send my accountant the year-end reports, they have always been through 
>LibreOffice where I can combine different bits of GC reports into the form 
>that he is happy with.
>
>HTH,
>Maf.
>
>
>On Wed 21 May 14 14:06:02 Theresa wrote:
>  
>
>>Thank you Michael.  I was able to print a beautiful transaction report that
>>I'm sure would be OK for any other accountant but mine.  She wants the
>>report to show a Balance Forward from the previous year.  Is that possible
>>with this report?
>>    
>>
OK Theresa --- first step, ask your accountant for WHICH accounts she 
wants the balance at the start. The reason I am asking this is because 
(assuming the previous year's books were closed, or pretend that they 
had been) the balances of ALL of the temporary income and expense 
accounts would have been zero. That's what a "close the books" does. In 
other words, it would be JUST the "standing accounts", the accounts of 
the balance sheet, that would have non-zero starting balances. If you 
don't have a huge number of these accounts, it's not going to be that 
hard to supply what your accountant wants.

a) Create the balance sheet at the start of the period. It is for these 
accounts you will need to manually edit the report.
b) Create the transaction report, export it, then copy that into 
something you can edit. Just a s work flow aid, to make sure you don't 
miss an account, I'd print that off so you have a copy you can "mark up".
c) Now using the balance sheet, go through that transaction report and 
mark each balance sheet account with the starting balance form the 
balance sheet report.
d) Using your favorite editor, edit the "transaction report" to insert 
all these amounts labeled as "starting balance. If you have that marked 
up copy in front of you, you shouldn't have missed any.
e) IF your accountant tells you she wants to see all the zero starting 
balance accounts too, you make a line for that at the first one, then 
copy and repeatedly paste in for each of the accounts that didn't have 
non-zero balances on the balance sheet.

Michael

PS: Because as you notes, this is an unusual request from your 
accountant, unreasonable to expect that gnucash would have  built in 
(non-manual editing) way to do this.