On 11/7/2022 7:11 PM, Kevin Buckley wrote:

Long ago in my Quicken days, I would generally keep about 3 years of  data
and then "archive" transactions older than that... I don't know if GnuCash
has (or needs) any similar feature.
For what it's worth, I have data going back to like 2007 in my file.
GnuCash does not really have an "archive" function (although there have
been 3rd party tools that do that.
Whilst there's no explict archive functionality, if you are using XML files,
there's nothing to stop you copying your current file, and then opening
up the copy and removing all transactions before a certain date.

Time consuming, yes: but easily do-able.

In the "old days" of pen and ink on paper accounting, it was common to open new books each year. They were, after all, bound volumes of finite size, that's why we say "the books". The process was:

a) Do a "close the books" operation with all income and expense accounts closed to equity. They are, after all, temporary accounts of fundamental type equity. Usually this would be through first closing them to another temporary account of type equity (profit and loss) and then THAT closed to equity by the net profit or loss to bring into balance.

b) At this point the only accounts with non-zero balances would be the standing accounts of types asset, liability, and equity. Run the Balance Sheet report..

c) Open the books for the new accounting period --- create the CoA with all zero amounts and then the first transaction is the opening transaction from the balance sheet << it would be a giant transaction, split on both the debit and credit sides.

You can do this with gnucash too. It is time consuming and a lot of work if/f you have lots of accounts of type asset, liability, and equity. Otherwise it is a snap.

Michael D Novack


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