Richard Wackerbarth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> In the days of "pen and (red) ink", the accountants literally closed the
> income/expense books and got a new book for the next period.
"Closing books" is a feature that's on our "real soon" list. I think
it goes a little beyond just transferring balances to equity; there
are implications for editability (closed books can't be changed) and
file storage (for data-security purposes, it makes sense to literally
start over, with the old books in a separate file that can be archived
as necessary).
> It is perfectly valid to generate reports which cover any arbitrary
> period of time. As an example, consider a company that starts its
> fiscal year on March 1. They would close their books on Feb
> 28/29. However you can reasonable generate a report for the calendar
> year. That report would not want to include the closing entries.
This is an important point. Whatever solution is arrived at for
closing books, we have to preserve the ability to have read-only
access to them for report generation. Even if periods don't "overlap"
in the sense you describe, it makes sense to have access to arbitrary
points of time in the past; how else would you generate a five-year
sales growth chart?
Bill Gribble
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