In my NewViews career I have run across a small minority of (DOS NewViews) users that do this – and I have never really understood why. When I ask, they usually don’t know either – they are just doing what someone did before them, and it’s been going on for years and years. (And, quite often they don’t know about making a template of their existing books and creating a new set based on the template. That makes the job a *lot* easier.)
Some believe you have to do this, but the only reason this could be true is if your books grow to 512 megabytes in a year (which is pretty rare.) Others don’t like to see all the old transactions in their accounts – and that is a subjective reason which I can’t argue with. Then there are those who were never shown how to simply set the Begin and End dates on their Income Statement (and related reports) to the new year. They truly believed that you had to start a new set of books every year and were simply amazed to find out that you didn’t. (The same thing applies to ‘closing the books’ – but that’s another discussion.)
So, now to NV2.
Yes, it would be possible to copy the database files to a new directory and then delete all of the journal entries. Here are the pros and cons:
– Pro: It would be easy. While I haven’t tried it, it would (should) be simple to click on the “root” Journal and then block all journal entries and do Block Delete. This would destroy EVERY posting in the books in one operation (And it would be a lot simpler than trying to do it in NV1 by the way, where you would have to go to possibly hundreds of places to delete transactions.)
– Con: The audit trail. The audit trail would contain a record of all the deletions on top of all the create operations that were there to start with. There is (presently) no way to ‘clean out’ the audit trail so you would be stuck with all those entries.
– Con: Time required. This is totally dependant on the speed of your system, the depth of your total-tos, the number of transactions, etc. Suffice to say the mass delete could take a long time.
I’m willing to bet that QW will at some point release a utility for NV2 to make ‘cloning’ a set of books a routine matter – but it is not here today.
I’m curious: What is your reason for starting a new set each year?
Bob
