[GNC] Are accountants happy with CVS exports?

[Dr. David Kirkby]

I asked my accountant about using GnuCash. He doesn’t know it, but said if
can export a CSV file that will be okay.

Previously I have used LibraOffice, with multiple tabs for different
things. Something like the following - he provided me with this as a
suggestion when I first contacted him.


1) PayPal account
2) Bank Account
3) Expenses
4) Assets
5) Stock - just a list of what I have at the end of the financial year.
6) Electricity usage

He can export that as a CSV file. It will have a list of expenses something
like

2/1/2023, widgets, £12.34
1/1/2023, things, £178.12

All values are positive, and the sum of those is the sum of the expenses.
That’s quite different from the CSV export from GnuCash, where each line
has either a positive value or negative, and the sum is zero.

Do people get any complaints from accountants about the format of the
files, or are they happy with them?

I could write my own post-processor using Linux command line tools to get
data in a format that more resembles what he had before.

Normally I get my accounts to my accountant near the end of the month they
need to be submitted, which is 6 months after the end of the financial
year. Next time I hope to get them to him *much* earlier so if he has any
problems with the exported files, I can manipulate them.

It would be nice if one could export all the expenses without the dates
being in a random order. The only way I can find to get dates in a
chronological order is to export every single account separately, so there
are no sub accounts. I thought about trying to write some code that would
allow all the expenses to be exported in one file in chronological order.
That’s not an impossible task, but would take me quite a bit of coding. If
I did it, I would just create something that’s command line driven, using
as many as the unix tools as possible to cut down the work. It might be
possible to just make a fairly complex shell script.

Dave


-- 
Dr. David Kirkby,
Kirkby Microwave Ltd,
drkirkby at kirkbymicrowave.co.uk
https://www.kirkbymicrowave.co.uk/
Telephone 01621-680100./ +44 1621 680100

Registered in England & Wales, company number 08914892.
Registered office:
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