On 12/18/2021 1:40 PM, Gyle McCollam wrote:
Yes, you can close the book and it will zero out income and expense accounts,
but it does not remove any transactions and it will not reduce the size of the
file. In fact, since it creates entries in all the expense and income
accounts, the file will actually be larger.
BUT --- this in fact how to proceed.
Imagine we were still in the old days of pen and ink on paper (in bound
books of lined journal and ledger paper). They would normally "close the
books" and open a new set each year (or whenever the volumes became full)
You can do the same thing with gnucash. You close the books and produce
a Balance Sheet report. It will only have the "standing" accounts. You
now export the CoA and import that into a new set of books. No
transactions in it yet. You now enter the opening transaction(s) using
the data from that Balance Sheet. Yes, can do it in one transaction, but
since entering a giant split is far easier if split on just one side
(either the debit or the credit side) easier if you use two, one for
assets and the other for liabilities. In other words, you credit
"starting equity" with the amount of "total assets" and then split up
the debits of all those assets and you debit "starting equity" with the
amount of "total liabilities" and then split up the credits of all the
liabilities.
At this point your new books have just TWO transactions.
Michael D Novack
PS: Of course you keep the file that was the closed books just prior to
this. If you ever have to refer back to something you would tell gnucash
to open that file instead of the current one. Use good sense naming the
files to serve as a reminder. Thus you might have Books2020.gnucash,
Books2021.gnucash, Books2022.gnucash, etc.
PPS: The PITA is if you end up having to re-examine some activity that
spanned a YE. But how often is that likely to happen?
_______________________________________________
gnucash-user mailing list
gnucash-user@gnucash.org
To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
-----
Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
