[GNC] Fiscal Year: Preferences vs Properties

[john]

> On Jul 7, 2022, at 7:05 AM, Paul Kroitor <paul at kroitor.ca> wrote:
> 
> Hello again,
> 
> 
> 
> Perhaps I missed earlier discussions about this, but is there a reason the
> Accounting Period is an attribute in the Preferences menu (and thus
> system-wide) rather than in the File Properties menu (as all the other
> company-specific items are)?
> 
> 
> 
> Am I correct that every time I open a set of books with a different fiscal
> year, I have to go into Preferences to change the accounting period? If I
> don't do this, all the reports use the wrong start and end dates.
> 
> 
> 
> This is nuts - I work with four different fiscal years here!
> 
> 
> 
> A related issue is why the accounting period specifies a year at all. Surely
> it should just be the month and day, since an entity's fiscal period are the
> same dates every year (e.g. Sept 1 - Aug 31).
> 
> 
> 
> I have the feeling I'm missing something basic about this..

You're not missing anything basic, it's a design decision from the early days of GnuCash; the original design wasn't for business at all, that was bolted on later, and didn't put much emphasis on one user having multiple books nor sharing a book between users. Those design choices are deep and affect both code and stored data so changing them in a way that maintains some sort of compatibility is hard. If you look through the preferences and the way various configuration data are stored--online banking and report configurations for example--it's easy to find more instances of "user" data should be "book" data.

No, fiscal years aren't always 365 1/4 days: The first and last fiscal years of an entity are usually truncated, as is one of the fiscal years when the entity changes the beginning of its fiscal year.

Regards,
John Ralls