Accounting Periods

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 2/12/2015 3:06 PM, David wrote:
> I migrated from Quicken to Gnu and imported all transactions from 1/1/2012
> into Gnu.  Today I used the Close Book function to Zero out Income and
> Expenses as of 12/31/2014.
>
> Since Reports in Gnu are Defaulted to Beginning of Accounting Period to End
> of Accounting Period, is there a way I can have the accounting periods be
> from the first of a month to the end of the month.
>
> I know I can go to preferences and make the accounting period be from "start
> to end of month".  Then any report I pull will be for the current month, but
> should I do that, how would I close out the accounting year?
>
I suspect that you are confusing the setting of "accounting period" with 
the effective date(s ) of reports. Those are NOT the same thing. 
Regardless of the date preference for accounting period you can 
respecify the dates for reports.

Maybe a concrete example would help? (you didn't say WHAT reports).

Let's say you accounting period setting is "calendar year" (that will 
default to current year). But you want to run monthly Revenue Statements 
(the modern name for P&L, after all, not all entities are for profit 
businesses, and gnucash calls this the Income Statement report). You 
would normally run along with this a Balance Sheet report for the last 
day of the month (you already have the previous month's so that is 
Balance Sheet before and after and Income Statement for the month.

OK, you run the Balance Sheet which will assume current date (when it 
was run). You then use "report options" to change that date to the end 
of the (previous) month. Presto the report changes (when you apply the 
change). You then run the Income Statement report, who knows what date 
interval it will use (depends on last time you ran it plus global 
preferences). No matter, again using "report options" you make the begin 
date the first of the previous month and the end date the last day of 
the month. Apply, and the report changes.

Yes, you would need to do that every time you run the report, but 
remember, computers aren't good at reading your mind. Unless you TELL it 
what date range you want to use, how could it know what you wanted? 
Maybe you want to see again the report for the previous year, the 
previous quarter, etc. While you are at this, you should explore all the 
other things you can change about the report. There are lots of options.

Michael D Novack