[GNC] Fiscal Year: Preferences vs Properties

[Paul Kroitor]

Thanks John. It confirms my fears, but it's good to know.

Yes, I know well about truncated fiscal years; but if an entity is worth its
salt, the short years are very few in comparison with the many years of
healthily ticking over. And the start and end years always have a bunch of
other special requirements / procedural quirks anyway.

I guess there's nothing to do but live with it.

Regards,
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: john <jralls at ceridwen.us> 
Sent: July 07, 2022 12:48 PM
To: Paul Kroitor <paul at kroitor.ca>
Cc: GnuCash User List <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Fiscal Year: Preferences vs Properties



> 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