[GNC] Are accountants happy with CVS exports?

[Maf. King]

I run my business accounts out of GC into LibreOffice for pretty formatting and 
so on and thence to my accountant for his magic touch for companies house and 
HMRC.

dead easy to get calc to open the HTML export from GC, or you can copy-paste 
IIRC.

HTH,
Maf.


On Monday, 2 January 2023 21:30:04 GMT Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> 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