What really happen during closing of a booking period is that you will move total expenses and income balance to your Equity balance. The result of both balance could be a profit or loss at the end of the booking period. This means that your expenses and income accounts for the new booking year will open with zero (0.00).
In Gnucash, the above is an easy task by running a running a tools from the menu Tools - Close book.
This tool will prompt you for a closing date, in most cases the last day of the year. The total Income and expenses account must be created in the Equity account tree. You may use the following:
- Equity
- 20xx ( the closing year)
- Expenses
- Income
Although some people or companies like to close their booking period with the above mentioned tool, but some may prefer to keep separate files for each booking year. They may reason that each closed booking year should be a read only file. They are right! But this same reason is also a disadvantage in case of corrections. For this situation you will have to correct the old year file and also the new year file.
For those who want to keep each booking year separate, here follows some steps and recommendations to help you with closing and opening new booking period in separate file in Gnucash.
Create booking period in a separate file
- At the end of the period, make sure you book all your income, expenses, interest received, etc
- Make sure you match your accounting with Bank statements
- Note: Some atm withdrawals or expenses may reflect in the next periode.
- Run all schedule task and disable them, if you have, if neccessary
- Save and Close Gnucash
- Backup the gnucash file in case something goes wrong. (duplicate the gnucash file and rename including something like "BEFORE End of Period" or else)
- Open gnucash file again
- Run the close book year: Tools - Close book.
- Save Gnucash
- Create the new file year by exporting the account structure: File - Export- Export Account
- At prompt type a name and browse for the desire location to save the new file structure
- Export the customer, vendor, employee data using one of my method discuss on this blog
- You may make print screens of your File - Proprieties and Edit - Preference screen
- Generate a Balance sheet Report: Reports - Assets and Liabilities - Balance sheet
- You must include the transaction from the beginning till the end of the period
- Also modified the report level to show level 3 or 4 (recommended)
- Close Gnucash
- Open the new file created
- import the customer, vendor, employee data you have exported previously
- Amend the business properties
- Amend Gnucash preference if necessary
- Using your balance sheet create the open balance entry (or Balance brought forward) for each Assets and Liabilities account. Note: Invoices can not be imported in this turial, but the opening balance. Payment for invoice created in the previous booking year should be post manually.
- Save your file
- Go to the file location
- Right click the file and slect properties
- In the file roperties windows, check the option Read Only.
- Click ok to save and exit the Properties windows
To unlock the file, just repeat above, but uncheck the Read Only option
In case of error
In case of error, do not panic! You have create the backup as suggested at step 5, right?
If not, post me your email immediately.
If you did then restore the backup you created at step 5 and start over at step 6.
If you have difficulties following my tutorial, you may contact us or comment your request .
No comments:
Post a Comment