[GNC] Order of accounts when closing the book

Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) stan+gc at fastmail.fm
Wed Jun 11 02:53:56 EDT 2025


On 2025-06-10 23:26, Steve Butler wrote:
> When I first saw your question, I was wondering why you wanted a
> particular order.

Just because it seems weird and disconcerting to have them all jumbled.
For instance, I have half a dozen categories of automobile expenses,
with Account Codes that group them together, and it seems strange not to
have them together.

You're right that if I want to see how a particular account did, I can
go to that account. But when I'm in a register for a particular account,
using the Auto-split view and looking through details for one reason or
another, it's jarring to get the closing transaction, which takes up a
couple of screenfuls and doesn't keep related accounts together.

As a result of earlier comments, I'm still thinking about whether to use
closing entries at all. Maybe I can do without them and get what I want
to see through reports. The question of whether to "close the books"
comes up here a few times a year, and I think most of us understand that
it's not a necessity but we may want to do it because that's how we
learned bookkeeping or for some other reason.
    Looking at it another way, we can always see current-period figures
in the Accounts Pane if we've activated that column. But closing the
books every year lets us see the totals by year in a given income or
expense account, without the extra step of running a report. What I'm
weighing is whether I actually want to do that often enough to make it a
factor in my choice to close books or not.

-- 
Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com


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