You’ve discovered the drawback to using the ‘Close Books’ procedure. (which is neither necessary, or recommended by the documentation) You can use it if you really want to, but you don’t have to for the software to function properly. Some older software or those with a longer heritage require books to be closed in order to even run some standard reports, or simply as a requirement. Closing books used to be practically and physically necessary to generate paper reports when the journals were on paper. GnuCash is much more modern in this respect. Closing books simply creates entries in each expense and income account to balance it to zero. It uses Equity:Retained Earnings as the balancing split. There is no locking of historical transactions, or any other permanent change made. If you intentionally or inadvertently edit, add or delete a 2018 transaction with respect to accounts or amounts, you’ll now have a mess on your hands. (another good reason not to close the books)
I don’t use the procedure, so I can’t comment on how this works, but I see many if not most reports have options to filter closing entries out. Give those a try and let us know what you find. If you want to ‘unclose’ a period, simply delete the closing entries that were generated by the procedure. It is probably easiest to do this from the Equity account. If you just want to play with unclosing make a backup first, then work on a copy and keep the copy of the file you prefer. Regards, Adrien > On Mar 3, 2020 w10d63, at 11:50 AM, Uttam Chakravorty <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > The topic and Adrien's advice resonated so I had to have a go. And it works > well. > > However, I did a 'close books' on 31st December 2018 (year = Jan - Dec). I > am therefore getting nothing in the 2018 column and assume I won't get > anything even in the 2019 (Dec 2019) once I close it. This is not too > horrible as I keep the html reports. However, I would like to know if I'm > missing a trick or just being stupid. > > Please note I think all the muppets are brilliant. I created the 'subject' > drawing on the vernacular. I offer my unreserved apologies to any muppet who > may be offended. Please know that you are my hero. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] 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.
