Correcting Opening Balances

Tue Jan 16 12:50:54 EST 2018

Tommy, this is very helpful and confirms some of my hunches going into tax time.

So far I have only moved six or so years of Quicken to my GnuCash archives.  I want to go through tax season before adding anything else.  Renaming and moving the older files should work best for me, although I am tempted to hide some of the inactive accounts, such as closed credit cards and sold securities.  I understand better now the relationship between the cards and the bank accounts used to pay off balances.

This is a big help and I agree with you that I’ll need more time and practice—plus some time with our tech consultant—before deleting anything of substance.  Overall, I see the value of GnuCash and just have to get used to its different features and requirements after more than two decades with Quicken.

Thank you again,

Richard Claeys

From: Tommy Trussell [mailto:tommy.trussell at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 9:07 AM
To: Richard Claeys <rclaeys at accesscom.com>
Cc: GNU Cash User <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>; Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com>
Subject: Re: Correcting Opening Balances

On Mon, Jan 15, 2018 at 11:32 AM, Richard Claeys <rclaeys at accesscom.com <mailto:rclaeys at accesscom.com> > wrote:

Here is an example of what I am encountering:  One of the accounts that
popped up after the conversion from Quicken is a credit card that I dropped
in 1998; when I click on "Delete Account" I receive a response along the
lines of "Do you want to combine this with credit card xxxx?"  Apparently
the double-entry accounting doesn't allow me to simply dispose of accounts
that no longer exist.

I'm not sure what the limitations on deleting accounts might be, but remember when you delete an entire credit card account you are not proposing to delete transactions from just one account -- EACH transaction will affect AT LEAST one other account, and if you deleted all of the transactions it would throw off the balance of every checking account you used to pay the credit card bill, and every expense account affiliated with those transactions.

Over the many years I have used GnuCash I have used two basic methods of handling accounts I don't use anymore. I either rename accounts or I make them "hidden" accounts. 

For example, if I get frustrated with Bank of Somewhere card and decide to close my credit account, I close the account, and I can immediately change the credit account's name from "Somewhere" to "CLOSED Somewhere" so I don't accidentally enter new transactions. But the transactions are still readily visible and adjustable. That situation might stand until the closing statement arrives. If the account tree seems to be getting too cluttered with accounts, another option is to a higher-level account heading so I don't have to look through them. For example:

Liabilities

  Credit Cards

      Bank of Elsewhere

      Bank of Nowhere

  Inactive Cards

      Bank of Somewhere

The other option I mentioned is just to set the account type to "hidden" and you won't see it in the account list anymore, and you won't be able to select it when you're entering new transactions. But the transactions will still appear in reports, just as you would hope. At any time you can choose to show hidden accounts in the account listing.

And as mentioned before, both our bank accounts are inflated by a factor of
10.  Can I just go back to January 1, 2018 and enter a fresh Opening Balance
that matches our printed statements?  Or is there another way to reset
balances without reinstalling and starting from scratch?

I would suggest that maybe you might consider EITHER 

1) Create two sets of books, one with your "archived" data (that you never again update) and one with your "current" data, OR 

2) Create fresh accounts in your existing books, using "current" and "archived" names or account headings, similar to the method shown in the example above.

I presume after you become more experienced with GnuCash you might either start over yet again OR merge the current and archived data as you desire. 

NOTE that at this time I believe there's no built-in method to merge data between separate books. So consider carefully how you might want to search for old transactions. You gain some flexibility having them all in one file, at the possible cost of having more "junk" you don't want to see while you're learning.

I also suggest that if you haven't yet filed your taxes for the past tax year you probably want your current book to include transactions back to the end of the PREVIOUS tax year, at least until after you file your taxes. So for example you might pull all your statements and get your books reconciled back to January 1, 2017. That way you can create similar reports in GnuCash and Quicken so you can more quickly become accustomed to the process.

When I started using GnuCash many years ago, I had Quicken transactions dating the 1980s through the late 1990s, and at some point I decided the very oldest transactions and closed accounts were confusing after GnuCash imported them, and I didn't want to bother fixing them all the way back to the beginning. 

SO from Quicken I exported all transactions into one file and set it aside. I also exported just the past few years' transactions from just the current accounts. SO if I need to find a particular transaction from the oldest files (which comes up extremely rarely), I use a text editor to search for the strings in the old archived QIF file, and I can determine the date, the vendor, or whatever. I decided not to bother having an "archived" view of the old transactions in GnuCash, but that's still an option if I ever need it.

If I need to see old Quicken reports, I go back to archived copies because I have no way to run old Quicken reports anymore. For those oldest transactions, the reports are printed on paper, but sometime after 2000 I started archiving pdf versions of all the reports I send to my accountants.

-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.