[GNC] End of year rollover

[Adrien Monteleone]

Welcome to GnuCash!

There is a ‘close books’ procedure you can use that zeros expenses and income to equity as ‘retained earnings/losses’ but you don’t have to use it. GnuCash does not require that you clear anything out at the end of the year. (and doing so can impact your ability to run reports in some cases)

There are people with 10+ years of data in very large files (with lots of stock tracking) and other than some slow loading times, there aren’t any major issues. (there are work arounds for the slow loading - somewhat)

Some people do a close books and open a new file each year. But that process requires archiving reports and the data files. It also means you can’t run reports for multiple years without external help (like from a spread sheet) or you can’t run reports that cross yearly boundaries. (say from 4Q18 to 1Q19) And if you want to look at prior year(s) data, you have to open each of those files separately.

The Chart of Accounts tab has an available column for totals that show all data in the entire book. (running totals from when you started using GnuCash) It also has a column you can make visible for totals just for this accounting period. (year) That way you can have an ‘at a glance’ view of your accounts without running Income Statements or Balance Sheets. (but those are available of course if you need them) The Summary Bar also shows current net worth and retained earnings/losses.

My personal workflow is to not use the close books procedure, make the current period totals visible on the Accounts tab, as well as keep open a YTD P&L, and a monthly P&L for last month and this month. I run Balance Sheets as needed. I also never close GnuCash except for upgrades. Thus I don’t experience the data file loading but a few times a year. And it is still relatively painless. (special note - loading is significantly slower if you leave reports open when closing the app. They will be loading on re-opening the program which takes some time)

As for reconciled transactions, they don’t ‘go away.’ But you can filter your register views if you don’t want to see them. (or any transaction before a certain date, say in the previous year)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 19, 2019, at 5:36 AM, garage cowboy <garagecowboy3128 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi   - I am a new gnucash user  ( just a few weeks).
> 
> First of all, congratulations and thanks to all those  who have contributed
> to  this great product.
> 
> My question is about EOFY processes   - I am used to products  which have
> an end of year rollover process which clears reconciled transactions   - is
> there equivalent function in gnucash?  What is the recommended approach?
> am wondering  what will happen in a few years  when there are thousand of
> transactions in the xml  file.
> 
> Also interested in contributing to the cause  but not a developer.
> 
> regards,
> 
> GC