Opening a New Account with Existing Retained Earnings

[Fred Bone]

On 26 October 2009 at 16:22, Mike or Penny Novack said:

> Mike Alexander wrote:
> 
> > --On October 26, 2009 6:40:52 AM -0500 Mike or Penny Novack 
> > <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
> >
> >> NOTE: the only problem I can see starting your books with a "retained
> >> form previous years" (and with a book "starting equity" also from the
> >> start of that previous time) is that unlike when working pen and ink on
> >> paper you can't split both sides of a transaction (AFAIK none of the
> >> modern computer apps allow that).
> >
> >
> > I don't understand what you mean by this statement.  It seems to me that
> > Gnucash allows an arbitrary number of splits on either side of a
> > transaction.  I must not understand what you mean by "split both sides
> > of a transaction".
> >
> >       Mike
> >
> >
> >
> I might be wrong about that but can't see how you would do it, at least
> not in a straightforward* manner. Please understand that it's an issue 
> even when doing paper and ink bookkeeping in a "journalless" system (you
> can do two side splits via a journal entry -- in effect GnuCash and
> similar systems are like "cashbook" style accounting except can enter form
> any account.
> 
> Are we talking about the same thing? By "two way" I don't mean an 
> arbitrary number of splits on the debit side OR and arbitrary number of
> splits on the credit side but an arbitrary number of splits for both the
> credit and the debit side of a transaction.

Why do you think there is a difficulty? I have plenty of transactions 
with multiple splits on both sides (mostly, but not all, two on each 
side).