per-book accounting periods
At the moment, all sets of books operated by the same user (under Linux, at least, no idea how it works with Windows) share the same accounting period. Changing the accounting period on one set of books changes it for all. This means that to have different sets of books with different accounting periods, one must set up different users, which is a very clunky workaround. By all means set a user-wide default, which any new book acquires, but it should then be settable on a per-book basis. This may be a more general idea that might also satisfy the request to "be able to have multiple companies with independent accounting periods".
kauer
shared this idea
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Jonathan Allard
commented
I happily second this proposal. It seems to be related to [#493789](https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=493789) in Bugzilla.
Copying my comment there:
## Problem statement
* As a business user of Gnucash, I need to manage at least one organization with a different year-end
* Prevents Gnucash from knowing the right year-end for my book
* Produces reports for the wrong periods* workaround: I need to set the date manually for each {report,period} I want to see
* workaround: I leave the tab open definitely to keep a {report,period} pair* I can not change the accounting period globally which is fixed (2019-04-01 to 2020-03-31; instead of each year ends on -03-31.) – eg viewing last year does this does not help me
=> Current issue disincentivizes organizations to use Gnucash, unfortunately
## Solution
A book-specific year-end date:* allows me to manage different entities in Gnucash
* encourages non-individuals/organizations to use Gnucash## Next steps
* Define 'year-end' option in book schema (location and type), and load/save logic. (Seeing a year-end date is year-agnostic, datum could be set in 1970 eg. 1970-03-31)
* Add setting UI in book properties
* Make reports use this data
* (?) Remove current global accounting period option -
Gauthier Guerin
commented
I think this would be very useful. I do the books for several organisations and it would greatly help to have this feature.
In addition, Colin's comment is right, and having specific custom report config for each book would be really helpful.
But these two features might have different level of complexity associated to them. It would be great to know if there is plan to implement any of the two.
Many thanks
Gauthier
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Nigel Stapley
commented
Having two sets of books with different accounting periods and different reporting requirements would make this change a real bonus.
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Gary B
commented
The accounting period could be a saved file attribute. This would solve the problem
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Colin Scott
commented
This is a sensible idea, but is only part of a rather wider picture relating to whether data (and preferences) should be global or local. For example, if you are running multiple books then you will almost certainly also want to have a different set of custom reports for each book. Ideally one should have the option, for any individual report, for it to be either global or local to the current book - presumably this should be an option on "save as" (if that ever gets implemented!).