Purpose of Accounting Period? Benefit to closing books?

[Derek Atkins]

Stan,

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> writes:

> On 2018-02-22 14:15, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> You must be reading old manuals.
>
> I read what's on line, and what installed with 2.6.19.
>
>> Closing the books just zeros out the Income and Expense accounts, rolling
>> them up into Equity.  The reports can do this on their own, so really the
>> only benefit is that your Income and Expense accounts will return to $0
>> instead of showing you a grand total for the life of your use of the
>> program.
>
> OK, thanks. I think this is one of those adjustments of thinking I need
> to make to do things the GnuCash way. Sounds like accounting period
> should be calendar year, because I really do want to reset income and
> expenses to 0 then, and I can do monthly reports in the interim.

I should also add that the Accounting Period setting in the preferences
really just provides a way to feed into the reports.  It does not
automate the closing of the books.

Also, it sounds like, from your work flow, that you can still do a
monthly reconcilation which is orthogonal to closing books.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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