Thanks Martin, that sort of confirms my thoughts on the matter. Most likely because my own background is engineering and computer science rather than accounting, though.
Regarding performance, perhaps there can be a convention regarding splitting input files by year. So I'd have one per year, and two 'main' files, one of which includes every year, and one of which includes only this year (maybe plus the previous 1 or 2 years if necessary). On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Martin Blais <bl...@furius.ca> wrote: > In Beancount this procedure is something that is done automatically at > reporting time by the software. We call the operation "clear" and there's no > particular reason to stick with the antiquated method of you having to do > this explicitly yourself. We have computers; the software can do that for > you. > > Well, perhaps performance could be one reason, but Beancount is easily fast > enough for 10-15 years of a normal person's data, and the way forward is to > do some performance optimizations instead of forcing the user through this > antiquated practice of having to close on some arbitrary time boundary. I > know H/Ledger users are fond of following old accounting practices for some > sort of romantic attachment, but I question the status quo, and so far I see > no rationale to force you to have to go through this rigamarole just because > people did it this way 20 years ago and commercial software cathers to > people used to that. Just keep your entire dataset in one place and process > it every time. It gives you the freedom to go back to any point in time and > draw a balance sheet or income statement for any arbitrary period. bean-web > by default provides year-boundary subsets, just like you need it. This is an > artifact of reporting. > > If that doesn't work out well for some reason, please let us know (and > please be very specific if you do so, I've thought about this a lot). > > > > On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 8:11 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.t...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> With Gnucash, one of the things I did every calendar year end (private >> accounts) was to 'close books'. In summary, what it does is create two >> transactions, the objective of which is to balance all >> incomes/expenses to zero. The period of time covered is normally a >> year, but configurable. >> >> Quick example, initial stage:- >> >> Expenses:Food 200 USD >> Expenses:Drinks 100 USD >> Income:Salary -400 USD >> >> The 'close book' function would then create two transactions which >> would be (in beancount syntax):- >> >> 2014-12-31 * >> Expenses:Food -200 USD >> Expenses:Drink -100 USD >> Equity:CummulativeExpenses 300 USD >> 2014-12-31 * >> Income:Salary 400 USD >> Equity:RetainedEarnings 400 USD >> >> The destination accounts would be configurable, I can't remember where >> I got their names from really. >> >> I found it necessary to do this every year so that within the year I >> could have a clean view of how much I had spent just in this calendar >> year in the account summary (without having to run reports). Of course >> I now realize I should have used the internal view filter in gnucash, >> but... >> >> Anyway the primary question I guess is whether such 'close book' >> transactions make sense, or whether I should get rid of them entirely. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Beancount" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAGQ70esYPA%3Dm-KiSq2DoHNSy%3DMDHx-FELBpZqKEJDQWq%3Dsy8TQ%40mail.gmail.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Beancount" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAK21%2BhOc3S_Y6dTGvbxvr8LEGYhN%3DDVrGcZjg8rAfQ8o_ZSWOg%40mail.gmail.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/CAGQ70eu_FRoUJpPzTPfQiHRN0-Oxjwq-PXvdFHiecnOi03W%3Dwg%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
