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From: "Marion and John Coulson" <jcandmecoulson at netspace.net.au>
Date: 2 August 2015 5:59:18 PM AEST
To: mailman at gnucash.org.
Subject: Suggestion for User Manual


Folk
I am not registered with Gnucash, and I couldn't see how to get registered from your web page; and I could see little need to register.

Here is my iSuggestion.

i am a remedial beginner user of Gnucash.

The user manual is fantastic for setting up the account system for the first time.

Here in Australia, for a small enterprise which owns a few rental houses and a farm which is big enough to warrant being registered to pay and receive refunds for Goods and Services Tax (GST) and so needs GST account reports every three calender months; and reports on each other account every financial year ending 30 June, There is a very good program provided by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).   There is no practical need to account for every dollar spent;   only to account for every dollar of income and the relevant tax expense dollars.    There appears to be limited need to carry the totals for each account forward from reporting year to year.

I could not find a description in the user Manual of how to start up a new financial year file with zero in the various accounts of the same account tree.

I did find after much searching in chapter 8.9 a thing called Close Book.   This chapter may mean something to a trained accountant but means nothing to a competent Civil Engineer with practical bookkeeping skills.   All the previous transactions appear to stay in the file which over a couple of years would become enormous.

What I did was print reports, very good standard ones, for each account which then formed the basis of my preparation of my, and my wife's, tax returns, using the ATO software.

I then 'Export'/'Account Tree to CSV
i then Saved and closed that file,   Called 'Our Name Finances 2014-15'
I then opened a new file, called 'Our Name Finances 2015-16'
Then I 'Import/CSV Account Tree to New File' and added the previous years closing data to the various Asset, Liabilities and bank and cash etc accounts.   All the tax relevant accounts then have zero balances and I can start entrering the various financial data as it occurs, the totals being relevant to the current financial year with no risk of corrupting last years data so it is available, consistant with my tax return in the event that the ATO want to audit my accounts .

I will repeat this process next year for both our financial accounts and for our separate Self Managed Super Fund accounts which are of the same form but need to  be internally complete year on year.

Maybe you could arrange for your user manual to include some guidance along these lines, to help other similar users.    And for very keen users, provide an explanation about why 'Closing' the accounts is better than what I have done.

Regards

John Coulson