[GNC] How to remove oldest transactions

[D.]

Thank you Michael for stepping in. You've summarized the process to which I was alluding.

I'll note that deleting old transactions using a keyboard shortcut is going to throw the balances off for every account that the deleted transactions touched, so you'll end up creating correcting balance transactions all over the place anyhow. 


-------- Original Message --------
From: Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net>
Sent: Sat Dec 18 15:03:37 EST 2021
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] How to remove oldest transactions

On 12/18/2021 1:40 PM, Gyle McCollam wrote:
> Yes, you can close the book and it will zero out income and expense accounts, but it does not remove any transactions and it will not reduce the size of the file.  In fact, since it creates entries in all the expense and income accounts, the file will actually be larger.
>
>
BUT --- this in fact how to proceed.

Imagine we were still in the old days of pen and ink on paper (in bound 
books of lined journal and ledger paper). They would normally "close the 
books" and open a new set each year (or whenever the volumes became full)

You can do the same thing with gnucash. You close the books and produce 
a Balance Sheet report. It will only have the "standing" accounts. You 
now export the CoA and import that into a new set of books. No 
transactions in it yet. You now enter the opening transaction(s) using 
the data from that Balance Sheet. Yes, can do it in one transaction, but 
since entering a giant split is far easier if split on just one side 
(either the debit or the credit side) easier if you use two, one for 
assets and the other for liabilities. In other words, you credit 
"starting equity" with the amount of "total assets" and then split up 
the debits of all those assets and you debit "starting equity" with the 
amount of "total liabilities" and then split up the credits of all the 
liabilities.

At this point your new books have just TWO transactions.

Michael D Novack

PS: Of course you keep the file that was the closed books just prior to 
this. If you ever have to refer back to something you would tell gnucash 
to open that file instead of the current one. Use good sense naming the 
files to serve as a reminder. Thus you might have Books2020.gnucash, 
Books2021.gnucash, Books2022.gnucash, etc.

PPS: The PITA is if you end up having to re-examine some activity that 
spanned a YE. But how often is that likely to happen?


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