On 1/9/2020 8:09 PM, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
Do you *need* to start a new file each year?
While GnuCash has a ‘close the books’ procedure, it is not necessary to use it
as that is a holdover from the days of pen and paper where physical limitations
of bound volumes required doing so for organization purposes. (maybe some minor
security purposes as well) Computers can keep everything in one file and you
simply run reports for the time periods you need.
If you want to proceed anyway, there are various methods and workflows, but
that really depends on your reason for doing so in order to determine which
will be most useful to you.
Yes, you can simply ’save as’ a new file and the old one will not contain newer
entries. This is the easiest and simplest way to retain your account tree and
current balance info across all of your accounts and any book-specific
preferences.
Some people burn the old file onto a read-only disc for archival purposes along
with PDF copies of year-end reports, though they can be regenerated by opening
the file.
I rather suspect that THIS is what the question is about. Even if you
make regular backups, useful to know WHAT the data status of a backup
is* << as of what time >>. So yes, after completion of books for a
year, no more entries going to be made for that year or reports run for
that year, I normally do a "save as" to a name indicating the new year.
I say using a name, since I would have THAT as part of the file name.
This on the YE backup I would see perhaps MATACFbooks2019,
MATACFbooks2020, etc. And yes, I would usually "burn" copies of the
books for an organization to be given into the control of another
officer -- but that would be done MUCH later in the new year when the
various filings could be included on the medium being turned over.
Michael D Novack
* The biggest "success" of my working days was to design/implement a
"system" (automated) to use unique dataset/file names to prevent a wrong
backup from being mistakenly restored or wrong file used for a run <<
there had been a major disaster (wrong backup used to restore) with one
of the world's large "financials" taking a week to recover and get back
to running current daily production.
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