At the end of last year (my accounting period), I did a closing transaction
(a huge split) to move all accumulated income and expenses into my equity
account. For the start of this year then, my income and expenses were back
to 0. This was not automated - actually it was kind of a pain.
I don't know if it's been changed or not, but at the time the order of
transactions that occur on the same day was pseudorandom (random to the user
at least). Thus, when I reopen the file, my closing transaction on 12/31
could have occured before other transactions that occured on that date.
That really isn't the way you want to see it, but it doesn't hurt anything.
What does hurt something is that the income statement has to be calculated
prior to closing and your balance sheet should be post-closing. I don't
know what they have now, but I had an export-to-text function (in C) that I
wrote and submitted to the list. I just used it to generate both reports
right before closing, then did the closing entry, then reran the reports. I
kept the pre-closing income and post-closing balance and deleted the others.
It wasn't elegant, but it worked.
Last, it is also kind of a headache because there was no easy way to archive
the period's transactions and start the new period with the correct accounts
and balances, but no transactions. I saw some posts about this, has this
been added? I haven't upgraded my version since before the end of last
year - I'm running behind.
I don't understand the deal about overlapping periods. You should do all
your closing entries at once, then start the new period. You can't overlap
periods and have your accounts be right.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Wackerbarth [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 9:59 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Opening Balances
>
>
> On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > Equity is also where any net income (income-expenses) goes at the end
> > of each period.
>
> Speaking of this, how is it proposed to handle "accounting periods".
> With computerized ledgers, it is convienent to be able to handle arbitrary
> periods. The asset and liability accounts are not a problem because the
> "balance" in them is really a balance. However, income/expense accounts
> have a "balance" which is really the running total since the last
> reset --
> the end of the previous period.
>
> Now, if you have arbitrary periods, there is no place to close
> the accounting
> period (xfer to equity) without messing up another overlapping period.
>
> One solution is to close after every transaction. However, if you
> do this,
> there is no real value in doing "double entry". It is just a
> verbose form of
> single entry.
>
>
>
>
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