Newbie: Transitioning from PHASAR

[Leo L. Schwab]

	Prepare to answer once again the standard battery of Newbie
Questions, with perhaps a slight difference.

	Background: Since 1994 or so, I've been maintaining my personal
finances using an obscure package called PHASAR (Personal Home Accounting
System And Register, or some such contrivance), running on an Amiga, though
it was clearly ported from DOS.  Had it not been for the fact that the
package was Y2K hostile (it still worked, but you had to go to extraordinary
lengths to get it to work), I'd still be using it.  One year later, I decide
it would be a nice thing to get the numbers under control again, but don't
need another reason to crash back to Windoze.  So I pulled down GnuCash.

	PHASAR keeps track of money using an account/category system.
Accounts are places where lumps of money sit (checking, credit card, etc.);
transactions are marked with the category of spending involved (dining out,
auto repairs, etc.).  PHASAR also maintains a special account called "Cash."
This is (theoretically) the amount of cash you have in your wallet at any
given moment (when you pull money out of the ATM, you're supposed to enter a
transaction from Checking to Cash).  The cash account is not applied to
certain expense calculations the program performs (I never quite understood
this detail).

	Accounts in PHASAR are created at any time with an opening balance.
Accounts may be deleted when the balance is zero and there are no
transactions logged against it.  PHASAR also had "standard transactions",
which were a set of transactions pre-defined by you which you could call up,
tweak, and apply en masse (this made it easier to enter paychecks).  At the
end of the year, PHASAR lets you do a "Year-end Carryover" where account
balances, income/expense categories, and standard transactions are carried
forward, and all confirmed transactions are purged from the datafile (one is
presumed to have archived a copy of the datafile beforehand).

	One especially cool thing PHASAR had that no one else seems to have
is a "unified transaction entry" window.  Whereas Quicken and GnuCash appear
to require you to open the register for a given account before you can post
transactions against it, PHASAR's entry method let you enter a transaction
against any account at any time.  This made it really easy to go through the
receipts in my wallet and enter them without having to sort them first.

	Okay, so back to GnuCash:  After reading as much as I can find,
including mailing list archives, I observe the following things:
	o Whereas PHASAR marked transactions with categories, GnuCash only
	  knows about accounts.  Thus, each category needs a separate
	  account under GnuCash.
	o Account "numbers" seem important somehow, but their importance or
	  meaning is not described anywhere I can find.
	o The closest thing GnuCash has to "standard transactions" is
	  cut-paste-and-edit of already-entered transactions.
	o I am in the habit of keeping a year's worth of transactions in
	  separate files.  However, there is no clear-cut way to do Year-end
	  Carryover.
	o "Opening Balance" in GnuCash is an aberration; I'm really supposed
	  to seed new accounts from a "Retained Equity" account, which I
	  need to create.  (Sub-issue: Do I need multiple Retained Equity
	  accounts for each "class" of seeded account?  For example, do I
	  need a separate Retained Equity account for every stock I own?)

	Is that correct so far?

	Another point: In PHASAR, I created a "phantom" account which I
called virtual savings.  This account held automatic payments from checking
which were never confirmed.  Since I'm a lazy schmuck, the idea was to let
me sock money away for rainy days with a minimum of fuss; the checking
balance reported by the program would be lower than what was actually there
(this actually came in handy more than once).  When I needed to loot the
virtual account, I would cancel the logged payments (checking balance
"increases") and I'd write a check.  Will GnuCash permit me to perpetuate
this illusion, or will I have to formalize it?

	My thanks for sitting through all this.

					Schwab