Hello Al!
Wednesday January 03 1996 17:12, Al Jennings wrote to Bruce Wilson:
 AJ> I too remember the frustration with year-end conversions.  I found
 AJ> the best way was to note the cash balance in the cash account, delete
 AJ> the cash account, set-up a new cash account with a starting balance
 AJ> equal to the previous year's cash balance.  This is the method I have
 AJ> been using for some six years.  Hope this helps,
    May I ask a question on this?  It seems to me that when you do this you 
lose all the detailed account analysis of the previous year.  In other words, 
suppose your total cash expenditure last year was 5,147 units (of whatever 
currency).  Before you delete the cash account, you have this figure nicely 
distributed among a host of categories.  At the press of a button you can get 
a true cash flow analysis for the past year or create a budget.  But the 
moment you delete the previous year's cash account, you delete (do you not?) 
all the cash entries in all the categories for the previous year, so that if 
you want to do a budget or cash flow analysis, you will be 5,147 units out in 
total, and all categories will be distorted.
    I find this rather annoying.  I have just completed a year in which I 
separated my holiday expenses.  I created a category for holiday expenses and 
then within that mirrored my normal expense categories.  So at the end of the 
holiday I knew how much I had spent in total on the holiday and how much in 
each of the (holiday) normal expense sub-categories.  Come the year end, I 
wanted to abolish the holiday expense category and merge all the holiday 
sub-categories back into the regular expense categories.  I can't do it.  I 
can find no way to transfer an item from a holiday sub-category into its 
principal category.  I can delete the holiday category but I then delete all 
the expenditure in the holiday sub-categories, which defeats the object of 
the exercise.
    I went back into the original cash, bank and cc accounts and changed the 
category of each item of expenditure in the holiday category to the regular 
category but when I run a report, all I see is that the expense items are 
duplicated.  I then deleted the duplicates in the holiday category and 
eventually the holiday category disappeared from the *report* but it still 
existed in the list of accounts.  Somehow, instead of being a mere category, 
the holiday cost centre seems to have become an account in its own right and 
I can't meddle with this, just as I can't with my bank, *cash* or cc 
counts!
    Or did I do it all wrong to begin with?
    The random tagline seems *very* appropriate!
Regards:
Terry G Wright
t.wright@obsdata.clipper.de
... I taught him everything I know and he's still stupid.
--- GoldED 2.50.Beta5+
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