On Thu, 18 May 2000, Jan Schrage wrote:
> If
> you are running a business, German tax laws require you to keep history
> for at least ten years
However, that does not imply that you must keep them "online". Archiving
closed books should be fine. If the auditors want the old records, they can
open a copy of the archive to access it.
> Of course the
> introduction of accounting periods into gnucash requires a change of the
> data format...
Perhaps.
There is the fundamental problem which is created by trying to treat income
and expenses in the same account structure as that used for assets and
liabilities/equity.
The difficulty has to do with the conflict between "closing" books and the
generation of reports/graphs which include information from those accounting
periods.
I strongly suggest that we address this now and establish the structure we
intend to use.
In traditional accounting, you actually start a new set of accounts each
period. However, for reporting, it is probably easier to have a single
account (file) that spans multiple accounting periods.
"Rolling up" closed entries can be accomplished by a series of
transformations which merge and simplify transactions.
This brings up an interesting question. Should we allow a single transaction
to have multiple dates?
One advantage in doing so is that we can easily handle the bank account
"matching" by posting the expense debit on the date that the cheque was
written and the bank credit on the date that the cheque is posted by the bank.
