[GNC] Hand-over on Succession or Short Term Absence

[Michael Hendry]

I think I’ve developed a reasonable hand-over method, thanks to members of the Gnucash Users.

I’m sending this partly as a record for me of what I’ve done, and partly in case anyone else has a similar succession problem.

Let’s say I have two books - BookA.gnucash and BookB.gnucash. I did the following:


1. Tidy up the existing saved reports, prefixing the report names with BookA or BookB as appropriate.

2, Close gnucash and make a backup copy of saved-reports-2.8 - say saved-reports-2.8_allbooks.

3. Open BookA in gnucash, and delete all saved reports whose names don’t start with BookA. Quit gnucash.

4. Click on saved-reports-2.8 and rename it saved-reports-2.8_BookA.

5. Make a copy of saved-reports-2.8_allbooks, and rename it saved-reports-2.8

6. Repeat 3, 4 and 5 for BookB.

7. Copy BookA.gnucash and saved-reports-2.8_BookA to Book A’s new keeper.

8. Repeat 7 for Book B.


9. BookA’s new keeper should copy BookA.gnucash to ~/Documents/gnucash (or wherever) and copy saved-reports-2.8_BookA to the appropriate directory for his OS. If it’s a new installation, he can just rename it saved-reports-2.8, otherwise he should copy and paste the contents of saved-reports-2.8_BookA on to the end of the existing saved-reports-2.8 file after backing up the latter by copying it to (e.g.) saved-reports-2.8_local so that he can revert easily later.

10. BookB’s new keeper likewise.


You’ll note that I decided to use GNC to delete the reports I didn’t want rather than using my original idea of creating a new saved-reports file by copying-and-pasting code from the old one.

I’ve tested this procedure using my wife’s Windows 10 laptop and all appears well. I await a report back from a prospective new keeper who has a Mac laptop.


Regards,

Michael