new year

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 11/8/2015 9:06 PM, Gary Holtum wrote:
>>> BTW, you probably meant "in all but expense AND income accounts".<<
> You are correct. That is what I meant. Thanks for the correction.
>
> I guess "close the books" does nothing about migrating balances to new year
> accounts. I will have to do things differently or find another program.
> Gary
You are ignoring the possibility of simple additional steps giving you 
exactly what you seem to want. Even in the old days of pen and ink on 
paper accounting they did not necessarily migrate to clean, empty 
physical volumes. They could just draw lines in the ledger and go to 
clean pages. Or in some cases use fresh books (the journal, the cash 
account, etc) and for others continue in the same physical ledger books 
till filled. I learned bookkeeping before the days of the computer << 
OK, the largest businesses had them already, but nobody else >>

Using gnucash.........

a) At the end of the accounting period, BEFORE doing close the books, 
make a COPY of the file. Name it "Pre-close Year xxxx".
b) Close the books. Make a copy of the file. Name it "Post-close Year xxxx"
c) Rename your file "Books Year xxxx+1"  (you are starting our with all 
your "standing" accounts and all income and expense accounts with zero 
balances).
d) For security and guarantee against changes being made to earlier 
years' entries, burn copies and give out of your control (can be used to 
verify changes have not been made) << I am treasurer of some 
organizations --- personal books might not need such safeguards >>

Now if "c" ISN'T what you meant by "migrating balances to new year 
account" you need to explain what you find wrong. I can think of a 
couple possibilities, but please save us from having to guess.


Michael D Novack