Purpose of Accounting Period? Benefit to closing books?

[Liz]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:43:49 -0500
Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> Thanks -- this makes sense. Seems I want to set my accounting period
> to the (calendar) year, because I do want to reset income, and
> expenses to zero at the end of each year. I've seen the relative-type
> dates in report options, but didn't think of using them in this way.

I have one set of expenses which I like to be able to see on a single
financial year basis very quickly.
So I have 
Expenses:A:10-11
Expenses:B:10-11
Expenses:A:11-12
Expenses:B:11-12
all the way from 2004 to 2018
I probably can roll them all up at the end of this financial year, as
there will be no ongoing use for the quick total view.

Then I can just delete each account and transfer to 
Expenses:A
and 
Expenses:B

and remove the read-only flags on those accounts.

There are many ways to do things, and you may find other ways of
getting your data without closing the books.

Again, starting with too much detail in the account tree is easily
altered, but not the other way around.

Liz