[GNC] End of year rollover

[Adrien Monteleone]

I too worked for a company that had an odd fiscal year - starting Nov 1 because that’s when they incorporated. They ran for decades like that till I convinced them to do a short year filing and align to the calendar the following year.

Do you mean that GnuCash should require closing the books and carrying over the balances? I wouldn’t support that at all. This app isn’t just for official annual reports. Many people use reports for analyzing their financial info and sometimes it is very useful to run reports for odd periods. Certainly, I’ve seen enough people on this list talk about job-tracking features and needs where they might have activity they need to report on that spans multiple monthly periods (and even parts of those) and also crosses yearly boundaries. Forcing a close-book procedure is taking a physical limitation of paper and applying it where it doesn’t really need to be.

The act of ‘closing the books’ served the purpose of organization of paper journals, as well as generating the consolidated figures to prepare an Income Statement. But computers render both of those considerations obsolete. (you can prepare the statement without the intervening calculations manually since the computer can do it at any time, and organization is up to you. You don’t have to keep separate files if you don’t want to.) But some people still are more comfortable with that procedure, so they have that option.

Being able to export all business meta data however would be nice. (in a format GnuCash could re-import of course)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 21, 2019, at 2:51 PM, Christian Kluge <frakturfreak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Am 21.03.2019 um 15:14 schrieb Derek Atkins:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Philip Burg <philip_burg at hotmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> I would like to close my books at the end of my financial year but
>>> have access to the previous years files, my thoughts were to archive
>>> the file at the end of the year by backing up to a cd/dvd then start
>>> afresh with the new financial year. would this be possible. I am using
>>> windows 10 and Gnucash Version 3.4 Build I.D. 3.4+(2018-12-30)
>> 
>> Archiving old books is always a good idea.
>> 
>> Restarting at the begining of the year, however, is not necessarily is
>> good idea.  Specifically, there is a Close Books feature that zero's out
>> your Income & Expense accounts into Equity, but it doesn't actually
>> DELETE any data.
>> 
>> Your other option is to Export the account tree which will create an
>> empty file and then re-open it.  The downside is that you will have to
>> reset all your opening balances, and if you use any business features
>> you will need to manually re-enter all that metadata too (customers,
>> vendors, tax tables, etc).  I highly ANTI-recommend this approach.
>> 
> 
> I don’t know how to say it, but I think GnuCash might be better off with
> a balance carry over method into the next year.
> 
> At least for me in Germany I can’t think of someone accounting for more
> than one year and also only on certain circumstances accounting for
> another period than 01.01. to 31.12.
> 
> I don’t know whether it would be possible to have an option the gnucash
> file for the previous year which would be used comparisson reports.
> 
> Is there a way to ex- and import the business related things?
> 
> If there were the scenario you’ve described would a bit cumbersome but
> still doable.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> Christian Kluge