This is what I do, but I'm only dealing with household and personal
accounts and smallish investment portfolios. Because the statement
closing dates for the investment and personal bank and credit accounts
don't correspond exactly with the beginning date of the new book,
there's always some monkey motion at the first of the year to "fix"
opening balances or manually add transactions that were in float.
Not much work, actually, and this keeps the year's data file (and
backups) down to a reasonable size. Access to past data is as easy as
opening the appropriate file (one must remember to ensure you're working
on the correct data at the start of the next session as the autobot
opens the last data file you uses, not the newest by date).
I understand that people using GnuCash for business purposes may be
facing different issues and restrictions.
RBM.
On 01/15/2018 01:54 PM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
Let's discuss this (and possible options)
First, you need to understand what "close the books" does do and what
is does not do. It creates a transaction (or transactions) to zero out
income and expense accounts to equity. It does NOT remove transactions
and so will not make your file smaller.
It sounds like what you want is something more like to was in the old
days of books kept in BOOKS, pen and ink on paper. What was common at
the end of each accounting period was to close the old books and open
new ones. The old volumes were put safely by in case they needed to be
referenced later.
One of the advantages of software like gnucash is that it can create
the usual reports without actually closing the books. Easy to
reference old transactions (previous accounting periods) without
having to "bring them back" as they would have done in the old days
when physical books. But suppose you don't want this, you don't want
to be seeing all those accounts that have become obsolete cluttering
up your view, etc. Or are worried about the sheer size of the file, etc.
You CAN simulate what was done in the old days when they opened new
books each period. This is just like when you created your gnucash
books in the first place. You run a final Balance Sheet report which
gives you the balances of all of the standing accounts (asset,
liability, and equity). You create a new set of books, say by
exporting the CoA and importing that to a new set of books (all
accounts zero) and can delete any accounts that are obsolete. You then
enter the initial values from the Balance Sheet << note: I never use
the facility to create accounts with an initial value but instead with
an opening transaction, or rather two so each is split on only one
side >>
You of course SAVE the old file. If you at some future time want to
look at old (prior period) transactions you simply ask gnucash to open
THAT (saved) file instead of the one you are currently using.
Michael D Novack
PS: All of my books are small enough that I have never been tempted to
do this. The obsolete accounts do not appear in the reports as
furnished to the boards of the organizations because EDITED first <<
in other words, I do not expect gnucash to produce the final pretty
version of reports. I have to edit them anyway to add annotations
explaining and unusual entries so all the editing for "pretty print"
etc. can be done at that time >>
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