[GNC] Gnucash-created "closing" entries

Stan Brown the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm
Fri Dec 28 14:35:34 EST 2018


> From: David Cousens <davidcousens at bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: [GNC] Basic Question (I hope) - End of Year Procedure
> 
> The easiest way to achieve that would be to manually perform the closing
> transactions rather than use the inbuilt procedure, then they are just
> ordinary transactionsand won't have the KVP pair in them. 
> 
> For closing transactions, they should always appear after any other
> transaction for the period being closed so that the transferred balances
> represent the true state of the accounts at the end of the period. This was
> why accountants introduced an artificial 13th month into the financial year
> so that all closing transactions were forced to occur fater any other
> transaction that occurred within the year. Any required adjustments to the
> accounts  are also usually carried out before the closing transactions for
> the same reason.
> 
> A list of key value pairs is a data structure that is part of each
> transaction record. It allows arbitrary data to be added to the main data
> structure (the transaction) without requiring that structure to be redefined
> throughout the code. Only the code for processing the data in the KVP needs
> to be added to the code base to add features requiring new data not
> previously stored. The facilities for extracting it and adding it are a part
> of the original transaction data structure. The KVP is also used in other
> data structures within GnuCash for the same purpose.


Thanks for your reply. I understand why you would say that the closing entries should be the last transactions, but let me explain why that doesn't work for me. The Gnucash closing entries are only two of about half a dozen closing entries that I have.

I make a distinction between (a) ordinary income and expenses, and (b) several non-routine types of income or expense that I can't plan for. (a) are Income and Expense type accounts, and GC closes them into an Equity account called Ordinary Income Summary. (b) are things like Gain or Loss on Investments, or Legacies, which would dwarf ordinary income and expenses, and they are Equity accounts, not Income or Expenses.

When I "close the books", GC generates two transactions, one summarizing income and one summarizing expenses. Then to have a transaction showing net income, I have to create it manually:

Debit:  Ordinary Income Summary   $500.00
Credit: Ordinary Income Summary   $425.00
Credit: Net Worth                 $ 75.00

Naturally, that transaction must follow the "close the books" transactions, since I don't know gross income and total expenses until after that transaction is created. And then my others:

Debit:  Gain or Loss on Investments: $ XXXX.XX
Credit: Net Worth                    $ XXXX.XX

And so forth, for the other non-ordinary accounts.

I know you suggested that I should create the closing transactions for income and expenses myself, but there are probably 50 accounts, so that seems like a lot of work.

Surely there's a way within the GUI to make the special "closing" transactions into just regular transactions, so that I can enter the half-dozen final closing transactions and have them in the right order. 

-- 
Stan Brown
the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm
https://BrownMath.com
http://OakRoadSystems.com/


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list