[GNC] Are accountants happy with CVS exports?

[Stephen M. Butler]

My CPA accepts the Balance Sheet and Profit/Loss Statement along with a 
multi-page Q&A his office provides.

On 1/2/23 13:30, 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
>
>


-- 
Stephen M Butler, PMP, PSM
Stephen.M.Butler51 at gmail.com
kg7je at arrl.net
253-350-0166
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