[GNC] Order of accounts when closing the book

[R Losey]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 1:54 AM Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) <
stan+gc at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> 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.
>

A confession: I've not been using the tool, but using the more laborious
method of closing each account individually... it takes a lot longer, but I
have a chance to review each account to see if it makes sense. I don't have
any particular order, but doing it that way, you could. So far, I found
errors of my own recording every year, so I'm a little afraid of doing the
automatic end-of-year closing the books.

I never did this for years, but I like having a yearly summary: Under
Equity, I have a FYnnnn for each year, with the income & expenses closed to
the year so that I can see at a glance how that year went... because they
are sub-accounts under Equity, the Equity total is also correct.


-- 
_________________________________
Richard Losey
rlosey at gmail.com
Micah 6:8