Question: How to move transactions between files.

[David Carlson]

Michael, Silly question: Where would I find an import file containing all
of the transactions after, say, December 31 2014?

David C

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Aaron Laws <dartme18 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <mpnovack at mtdata.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > On 10/19/2016 2:12 PM, Colin Law wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> On 19 October 2016 at 18:53, carlo <carlopel at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> I have transactions going back to 2012, and just make searches, reports,
> >>> etc. too cumbersome. Do you not have any archive abilities for old
> >>> transactions?
> >>>
> >>> Mine go back to 1996. In what way is it cumbersome?
> >>
> >> Colin
> >>
> > But let's say that it is (becoming to large, too cumbersome). It might be
> > useful to discuss "prehistoric" bookkeeping, pen and ink on paper, and
> how
> > THAT dealt with this. The reason we call financial records "books" is
> that
> > once upon a time they WERE kept in bound books. Since these were of
> finite
> > size, it would be necessary to migrate to new volumes as the original
> ones
> > got filled up. The USUAL way this was done was to begin new volumes each
> > year. After doing a "close the books" a new set of books would be opened
> > based on the Balance Sheet report << contains just the "standing"
> accounts
> > as all temporary accounts of type Income or Expense have zero balance
> after
> > a "close the books".>> Of course when it was necessary to examine a
> > transaction from a prior year, had to drag out the volume for that year.
> >
> > You can model THAT using gnucash easily enough. And if the purpose is to
> > prevent the file from becoming too large/cumbersome, just do it every
> > several years instead of every year. The "old" set of books should be
> > burned to read only medium so when being looked at can't be changed.
> >
> > The feature request is in effect to be able to do this after the fact. To
> > have the result of having done this a few years ago so only the
> relatively
> > recent transactions are included (the ones most likely to need looking
> at).
> > Actually the feature missing isn't delete the old transactions (which
> would
> > NOT have the desired result) but:
> > a) close the books as of the desired date
> > b) create a new set of books based on the Balance Sheet that date (after
> > the close)
> > c) IMPORT all transactions after that date into the new set of books.
> > That would be the correct operation to have the desired result (valid set
> > of books with only transactions after a specified date).
> >
> > Michael D Novack
> >
> >
> Thank you for this worthy articulation of this oft-heard request. I've
> heard this idea tossed around several times, and the answer usually comes
> down to, "come back and talk to me in a century when your books actually
> might be too big." What you have suggested is actually possible to
> implement in gnucash should someone be moved to do it, and it could be done
> in several ways. Do we have a ticket to this effect? If someone would point
> me in that direction, we should capture this coherent strategy there.
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