Year end issues

[Ronal B Morse]

This is what I do, but I'm only dealing with household and personal 
accounts and smallish investment portfolios. Because the statement 
closing dates for the investment and personal bank and credit accounts 
don't correspond exactly with the beginning date of the new book, 
there's always some monkey motion at the first of the year to "fix" 
opening balances or manually add transactions that were in float.

Not much work, actually, and this keeps the year's data file (and 
backups) down to a reasonable size.  Access to past data is as easy as 
opening the appropriate file (one must remember to ensure you're working 
on the correct data at the start of the next session as the autobot 
opens the last data file you uses, not the newest by date).

I understand that people using GnuCash for business purposes may be 
facing different issues and restrictions.

RBM.


On 01/15/2018 01:54 PM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> Let's discuss this (and possible options)
>
> First, you need to understand what "close the books" does do and what 
> is does not do. It creates a transaction (or transactions) to zero out 
> income and expense accounts to equity. It does NOT remove transactions 
> and so will not make your file smaller.
>
> It sounds like what you want is something more like to was in the old 
> days of books kept in BOOKS, pen and ink on paper.  What was common at 
> the end of each accounting period was to close the old books and open 
> new ones. The old volumes were put safely by in case they needed to be 
> referenced later.
>
> One of the advantages of software like gnucash is that it can create 
> the usual reports without actually closing the books. Easy to 
> reference old transactions (previous accounting periods) without 
> having to "bring them back" as they would have done in the old days 
> when physical books. But suppose you don't want this, you don't want 
> to be seeing all those accounts that have become obsolete cluttering 
> up your view, etc. Or are worried about the sheer size of the file, etc.
>
> You CAN simulate what was done in the old days when they opened new 
> books each period. This is just like when you created your gnucash 
> books in the first place. You run a final Balance Sheet report which 
> gives you the balances of all of the standing accounts (asset, 
> liability, and equity). You create a new set of books, say by 
> exporting the CoA and importing that to a new set of books (all 
> accounts zero) and can delete any accounts that are obsolete. You then 
> enter the initial values from the Balance Sheet << note: I never use 
> the facility to create accounts with an initial value but instead with 
> an opening transaction, or rather two so each is split on only one 
> side >>
>
> You of course SAVE the old file. If you at some future time want to 
> look at old (prior period) transactions you simply ask gnucash to open 
> THAT (saved) file instead of the one you are currently using.
>
> Michael D Novack
>
> PS: All of my books are small enough that I have never been tempted to 
> do this. The obsolete accounts do not appear in the reports as 
> furnished to the boards of the organizations because EDITED first << 
> in other words, I do not expect gnucash to produce the final pretty 
> version of reports. I have to edit them anyway to add annotations 
> explaining and unusual entries so all the editing for "pretty print" 
> etc. can be done at that time >>
>
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