Don, I think most of your points have been covered by subsequent posts from other users. I think the confusion largely arises from historical accounting practice where each period had a physical journal and each account had its own physical ledger book and entries were hand made in ink (We won't go back as far as the days of clay tablets and cuneiform marks). Changing an entry in these circumstances generally produced an illegible/unclear mess intoroducing the concept of reversing entries to correct mistakes rather than applying the correction in the original entry. Similarly with closing the books. The steps you specified were carried out in the journals and ledgers at the end of the period and then the closing balances transferred to new physical books for the next period.
Accountants, being fairly anally retentive, have kept to this practice far longer than is really required given the capacity of software systems to maintain continuous recording and many people also tend to confuse the "closing the books" accounting procedures with opening and closing a new computer file. As others have pointed out Gnucash's report system can generate reports which contain the information produced by the traditional closing procedures without actually having to perform those procedures explicitly. One of the beauties of Gnucash is that generally it can support any accounting practice you want to adopt however there are not always automated procedures incorporated. E.g "cash" vs "accrual" accounting. One factor in this is that Gnucash is used in many different legal jurisdictions and an automatic procedure which is valid in one jurisdiction may not necessarily be valid in another. The other major factor is that the developers are all volunteers so they have to prioritize their efforts. The documentation is largely in the hands of others who don't write the code. The time to implement a quite small change in the Gnucash code extends rapidly becasue of the complexity of code written by a number of different people over a long period of time as I am currently finding out. On your point #4 others have pointed out that in reality there is no such thing as locked computer data file and that the best you can do is to write a datetime stamped version of the datafile on a read only medium or print out a set of reports at a given date time and store them, preferrably multiple copies stored separately. One feature I personally would like is the ability to restrict new data entry to a user settable specific period, not to lock previous data from change, but to prevent inadvertant accidental data entry in previous periods. I have on odd occasions entered data at the wrong date (usually by getting the year format incorrect) accidentally in a previous period (in one case 3-4 years before) and then because the entry hadn't appeared in my current period compounded the error by rentering it in the correct period. This can take some finding, particularly the first time it occurs and you soon learn to check before hitting return fairly quickly as a consequence. -- View this message in context: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/How-to-close-a-financial-year-tp4691662p4691900.html Sent from the GnuCash - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
