On Sun, Dec 22, 2024 at 12:10 PM Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 2024-12-21 18:54, R Losey wrote: > > However, some people enjoy zeroing Income and Expenses each year to > Equity > > (I learned about it last year, and tried it, and I really like the > benefits > > I get from it). For me, I created a FYnnnn account under Equity, and then > > and an "yyyyIncome" and "yyyyExpense" sub-accounts under the > > FYnnnn account. All expenses have their balances as of 31 Dec > transferred > > to the "nnnnExpense" account and all the income accounts have their > balance > > as of 31 Dec transferred to "nnnnIncome". > > > > [As people here have pointed out, the only small drawback is that you > > generally don't want to have income/expenses on 31 Dec - so that when > > reports are run, the end of December (or the end of the year) should be > set > > to 30 Dec. If you use 31 Dec, it will include the equity transfer, and > the > > numbers reported will be zero. But I can live with the workaround.] > > This is an interesting idea. I do close the books on Dec 31 (well, > _as_of_ Dec 31 but entered a couple of days after), because I like > seeing how overall ordinary net income or loss, plus one-shot items like > a house sale or HVAC replacement, affected equity. But I never thought > of turning Equity into a placeholder parent with FYnnnn children. > The idea of doing the transfers on 31 Dec and then doing reports through 30 Dec came from this group. I supposed one could do the transfers on 01 Jan and just ensure that reports start on 02 Jan. I think the FYnnnn was suggested here, too. > Can you say a bit more about the purpose of the yyyyIncome and > yyyyExpense sub-sub accounts? If you close the books, won't there be > just one transaction a year in each of those? Or do you close the books > manually, entering one transaction per income or expense account, as > opposed to using the GC menu item Tools » Close Book? That would let you > control the order of entries, unlike the GC menu "Close Book". > The FYnnnn account is the parent of the yyyyIncome and yyyyExpense accounts. With those sub-accounts, I can see at a glance the income for a year, and the expense for a year, and the net change for that year; there is probably a report that does this, but it's useful to me to just look at it. I confess: I haven't used the GC menu item yet -- I don't know what it does (I supposed I should create a copy of my records and play with it). Last year was the first year I did this, and I went back and closed out each prior year, too, so the menu Close wasn't an option. I just go through each Income and Expense account and transfer the end-of-year total to the appropriate yyyyIncome or yyyyExpense account. So far, it has served my needs well, but I feel as if I'm a latecomer to doing this, and I'll learn and adapt. -- _________________________________ Richard Losey [email protected] Micah 6:8 _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: 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.
