On Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 12:14 PM Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) < [email protected]> wrote:
> >> On 6/10/2025 12:36 AM, Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) wrote: > >>> The Close the Book tool generates two transactions, one for all income > >>> accounts and the other for all expense accounts. The accounts are not > in > >>> alphabetical order in either transaction, nor are they in Account Code > >>> order, nor arranged by the values of the splits. > >>> > >>> They _seem_ random, but I can't imagine they really are. Can anyone > tell > >>> me (a) how they're actually sorted, and (b) how I can get them in > >>> Account Code order? > Thanks, Stephen. I was afraid that was the answer. > > I guess what I'll need to do is set up a scheduled transaction with one > simple transaction per income or expense account. I can make them show > up in the desired order by placing the Account Code in the Num field. Of > course I'll have to remember to change the SX every time I add or move > an income or expense account, and at the end of the year I'll have to > enter the appropriate balances manually. That all seems like a lot of > work, with plenty of room for mistakes. > > Although ... When HTML was a lot newer, I hung out in the HTML and CSS > newsgroups. Very often, someone would post a requirement and ask how to > accomplish it, and the answer was "stop wanting that" because the > then-current HTML and CSS specs didn't provide an answer. Maybe the > right answer to my query about getting closing entries in account-code > order is "stop wanting that". Your point about a new release of the > software possibly changing its own strategy is a good one; I too have > seen that happen from time to time. > > (Before I go any further, I should say that I use GC for my personal > accounting, not for any business or other organization. So I'm free to > choose the bookkeeping practices that give me the kinds of information I > want to know.) > > I need to think about just what I hope to gain by closing the books > every year. And it may be part of a larger context that I need to > resolve also. Here's what I mean by that. > When I learned bookkeeping, we distinguished between ordinary > income or > loss) and extraordinary items. Ordinary income was the result of normal > recurring activities, what a business would call day-to-day operations. > Extraordinary items were items that recurred seldom or never and would > distort the computation of net income if they were included, like > getting a significant legacy or having your house flood. Extraordinary > Items was an equity account; it got closed into the top-level equity > account and didn't appear in the income statement except perhaps as a > footnote. > But ultimately, both Ordinary Income and Extraordinary Items affect > total equity, whether they get closed into the top-level Equity account > or not. I need to think carefully about whether keeping Extraordinary > Items in Equities is really the right thing to do in my situation. Then, > I suspect, I'll also know whether to close the books every year, and if > so whether I can use "Tools » Close Books" or need to do the work > manually. > When I first saw your question, I was wondering why you wanted a particular order. I started closing out the books a couple of years ago, and it has been helpful, but I've never really given the order any thought. When I want to see how a particular Income or Expense item did, I go to that account and look there for the end-of-year closeouts. By the way, how do you deal with whole year reports? If you close the books on 31 Dec of a year, and do a 01 Jan - 31 Dec year, the Income and Expenses will be zero. I do my reports from 01 Jan - 30 Dec, which means that any transactions that occur on 31 Dec I change the date to 30 Dec. I got that idea from this group, but perhaps you have a better way. -- _________________________________ 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.
