Rogier, You can add an opening balance transaction at any time. The opening balance tool just provides a convenient way of doing it. If the opening balance transactions initially entered prove to be incorrect they can also be edited.
The function of Retained Earnings in Equity is to receive the nett profit of the business that has been recorded in detail in the temporary Income and Expense accounts when they are closed to equity at the end of the financial accounting period. If you are starting a new book, then there are no balances in the Income and Expenses accounts to be closed to Retained Earnings. In GnuCash the report calculations will generally include the amounts from Income and Expense accounts for the specified period In the previous set of books, the Income and Expense accounts presumably will have been closed to Equity annually which has resulted in the balance you wish to carry forward. When you enter the balances you are carrying forward for the assets and liabilities, the opening balance amounts added in Equity will have automatically have included what was the Retained earnings balance from the previous set of books. You cannot create an opening balance for an equity account at account creation because it would duplicate what has already been recorded in the opening balances and as you have discovered you cannot create an opening balance for an equity account at creation. The only way you can create a Retained Earnings account with its balance as in the previous set of books is to manually create a transfer from The Opening Balances (debit) account to the Retained Earnings (credit) account in the new set of books as I described in a previous post. Note the debits and credits in this transaction will be in the reverse sense to those in the Opening Balances account when you created the Asset accounts and entered their opening balances but will be the same sens as the entries produced when the Liability accounts. There should be no need to delete the Retained Earnings account if you have already created it. Open the account register and add a manual transaction at the date you opened the books as described in my previous post and above. David ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ 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.
