[GNC] End of year

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 1/30/2024 12:12 PM, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> You can't. I thought we described that already.
>
> If you start a new file/account each year, you will lose all 
> auto-complete from the previous year's entries.
> The auto-complete list is generated on the fly from the other 
> transactions in the register you have open at that time. If that 
> register doesn't contain previous transactions because you started a 
> new year, then you don't get auto-complete suggestions.
>
> If auto-complete is important to you (it does save lots of time!) then 
> don't start a new file/account each year. 

Let's not confuse two very different things under the name of "year end 
closing"

ONE refers to closing all the accounts of type income and expense 
(temporary accounts of fundamental type equity) into equity itself or 
accounts under equity. You will have to be doing the latter if the 
entity type isn't "sole" (personal books or a sole proprietorship) 
because need to allocate to the individual partners or shareholders. 
Just closing the accounts of type income and expense WILL start the new 
year off with these at zero. Gnucash can produce reports without closing 
the books, but if you like to see the current income and account 
balances (just for the current accounting period) you might want to 
close the books.

Making a backup copy of the books is just like making a backup of any 
other file. Hopefully you are not JUST making a year end backup, but 
that's the one you might be sending additional copies to safe keeping.  
While just doing this does not prevent you from altering the past it 
does make that detectable.

The SECOND meaning is to also "start fresh" with just the balances of 
all "standing accounts". This file would have no past that could be 
altered. But as noted, you will lose things like autocomplete. It more 
closely mimics the old days when books were kept in physical volumes, 
starting in a fresh volume each year. THAT is why we still call these 
financial records "books" because for many hundreds of years, they were 
books.

Michael D Novack