Delays in transfers between accounts

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 09:32:08AM +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Doug Laidlaw wrote:
> > Banks get around the overdraft situation by posting credits before debits.  
> > Gnucash posts bank receipts (increase in asset=debit) before payments 
> > (credits.) so your books should never show a non-existent overdraft.
> 
> I have no idea what you are saying. Are you sure we are talking about 
> the same thing? I am not talking about debits and credits that happen on 
> the same day. I'm talking about debits and credits that happen 3 weeks 
> apart. If I enter a deposit for August 12 when the money was really 
> available on September 20 and I make a large payment on September 29 
> GnuCash will indeed show an overdraft that was never there.

? I'm assuming you made a typo there, otherwise, how could money
available on Sept 20 show as an overdraft if you make the large
payment 9 days later? 

regardless, my original point was that there is more than one way to
do things. If it matters to you that the dates match up on both ends,
then its perfectly acceptable to use a "suspense" or "in-transit"
account to keep track of things, but its more work. I use "undeposited
funds" in my business all the time. I book sales as one monthly
transaction into that account and then use my back reconciliation to
draw money from that account into my various checking and money
market accounts. It works  nicely and keeps my transactions to a
minimum. It doesn't refelct reality in terms of the dates of
transactions, but it summarizes the many many many actual deposits
into a handful of large transactions. IOW, do it the way that works
for you, just do it consistently and logically. 

for your specific situation, show a split transfer as:

date1 Bank1 -> suspense 
date2 suspense -> Bank2

and that's perfectly okay. 

sorry if we headed off down the wrong path.

A
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/attachments/20070709/4f576b05/attachment.bin