When doing my annuals, I found that in balance sheet (earnings & losses as well) I can only select by date, but not by accounting period, as I can in Reporting > General Ledger.
Thus, once the “Balance Non-Deferral” wizard is executed, I can no longer view the actual balance sheet for accounting period 12, which e.g. I used for tax authorities.
Is there a special, not-so-obvious trick - or would it be an improvement to have the “by period” selector as well at balance sheet and E&L ? - Well, I can shift these balancing moves out of the year in question or can delete them and create them again - but that do not really come in a handy manner.
You do not need to so. You just need to use the last date of the fiscalyear and the proper balance sheet shoud be seen.
Normally the chart of accounts includes the earnings as loses in the balance sheet by including them as child of the results type. So once the accounts are balanced the amount is included in the result account which is part of the balance and then its values are shown correctly.
Thank you for your thoughts. Not sure if I made myself clear enough.
I recently had a talk with my accounting advisor, and he told me that it’s quite common (in Germany as well as internationally) to have 13-15 accounting periods:
1-12 (Jan-Dec) doing plain accounting
13 for corrections
14 for results of the “Balance Non-Deferral” wizard
15 for corrections subsequent to audition results
Moves of period 13-15 are normally put into Dec, 31th.
So AFAIK, I can only view the balance sheet of period 15, but not of period 12-14, and to me, this is a problem. Hope, now it’s described better.
NB: In General, I like Tryton’s “no gimmicks” approach. But at several points, I think that went too far. Examples:
Why do we not see / can search for amounts at Financials > Entries > Moves?
Why can we not seach / filter for amounts at balance sheet and E&L ? - Thus, balance sheets consist mostly of linies with amount “0”
What you call periods 13-15 is what in tryton is called “Ajustement periods”.
Such reports can be filtered out on Income Statement but not on balance sheet as balance sheet is always printed on a given date because it cumulates the amounts from all fiscalyears.
If you want to filter moves from 13-15 periods you can create them in draft state. If you do so you will be able to exclude them from the Balance sheet using the “Posted Moves” checkbox.
Otherwise, you will need to add some custom code to support your specific use case.
I do understand the idea, but it solves only a part of the problem.
I still do not understand why some “claims” in Tryton (as mentioned above) are defended so fiercely, instead of just adding a few lines of code.
This is open source, you are free to add the lines of code on your custom tryton and that will solve the problem for you.
If you think that this is a generic need and your code deserves to be added on the tryton upstream module you can contribute your custom code so its added upstream.
Having said that, in previous replies I just explained how tryton works now and tried to explain a solution that may work for you. Never tried to defend anything, sorry if there was some missunderstanding in my word.
I recently had a talk with my accounting advisor, who has 30 years’ experience in accounting, both domestically and internationally. When I showed him this limitation, he just laughed and said, ‘With this limitation, Tryton is not usable for professional accounting purposes.’
And no sorry, I cannot contribute code, that’s beyond my abilities. But I can give user feedback, which should be hold valuable as well in an open source project. But it seems it is not, different to other FOSS projects.
The goal of the balance sheet is to show that your accounting is actually balanced.
This can be done only at a specific date but not on a period.
So I do not understand why it is a problem once you have balanced the non-deferral because the non-deferral accounts are in the income statement which can be analyzed per fiscal year and periods (and the adjustment periods are excluded).
Please explain why you need this strange calculation of balance sheet (and authority argument will not help).
It feels, I’m always repeating the same thing:
You guys - programmers and accountants - are living in a different world. For you, things are straight forward, very few (if at all) mistakes are made.
For the rest of us, things are very different. Creating an annual report is a very messy process, lots of trial and error, going back and forward. So, the different states of the annual report need to be monitored simultaneously, because you can never be sure not to have messed up period 13 or 14 by some change in 12 (which even may have come in by accident).
My real-world case:
My 2024 annual report, which I sent to tax authorities, contained a mistake. They requested for correction, luckily my 2024 moves were not posted, so I corrected that mistake. Now I need to see period 12 figures to again report them to tax authorities, but I cannot, as I can not filter for them. If I filter for Dec, 31th, 2024, the 2025.00XX type of moves are included, which would lead to wrong numbers. Yes, I can shift these .00XX moves to the next year - but hey, that’s even more messy than the rest of my working mode
And of course, tons of other types of mistakes can happen.
I do not understand how this can be possible.
You should not be allowed to modify your accounting after having report the period. Any mistake must be fixed on the next period.
I had similar problems with Tryton and my accounting moves where posted. So I just cancelled the moves and created a new one fixing. No issues so far.
As programer with accounting world I do not think the differences are so big. The same happens when you reach a new culture, you need to understand the others person point of view an Tryton to open your mind.