Previous fiscalyear amounts in income statement account values

Hi,

Recently some of our users get confused while digging into the Income Statement accounting details. She double clicked on a record of the Income Statement report to show the details per account but the Balance shown there didn’t match the account details.

The confusion is caused because we include the initial balance on this view, which includes the amounts of previous fiscalyears but the amounts from previous fiscalyears should never been included on the Income Statement report.

Why are those values shown there?
Does it make sense to hide the values from previous fiscalyears? Or there is some usage that I am not aware of?

Because the previous fiscal year is not correctly closed and we display the general ledger when opening.

For me it is a problem to change what the general ledger display.

Yes, I agree that we should not change the general ledger because its also used for balance accounts where it makes sense to have such values.

Just thinking on hidding the values when opening from the income statement or even do not show previous fiscalyears amount for income accounts.

I do not understand. How can you display different values and in the same time not changing the general ledger?

If we do not want to alter the general ledger we can add a context flag to alter the values when opening from the Income Statement.

But I’m wondering if it really make sense to show previous fiscalyear values for accounts of Income types on the General Ledger. The reason is that they have the same balance no mather if the previous fiscalyear have been closed or not. With the current behaviour the balance depends on the closing of the previous fiscalyear because the previous fiscalyear balance is included on the final balance computation.

It does because the income has not yet been posted to the balance sheet.
So removing the previous income will create an unbalanced general ledger.

Maybe we could just use a GL view which display only the internal balance when opening an income statement type.

That sounds good to me.

I’m not sure if we should expect that the general ledger is balanced. The balance is what should be always balanced and this will be also the case.

IIRC the general ledger is also unbalanced if an account with children is included on it because the balance of both accounts are included.