Tracking Money in Savings Account

[Wayne Bird]

Thanks Derek for your reply!

Yes, define "standard accounting method" -- good question:)  Granted, everyone has their own way of doing things, however it appears the most common method is tracking assets, income, expense, etc. where income is viewed separately from expenses.  For example, my paycheck would just go into an income account and that's it.  Then I would track all my expenses through various expense accounts.  On the other hand,  I have always used the envelope system, divvying out my paycheck into these various categories.  So these categories (or accounts) can be seen as both income (because I'm splitting my paycheck/income into these categories) and expense (because I'm purchasing items from these categories).  This is what makes the most sense to my little brain:) and that's why I'm having difficulty with "standard" accounting methods because they have to be separate.  

I'm sure I'm making this more difficult than it should be, so if you please continue to with me I'll use the suggestion of subaccounts that each of you made and go from there.  I haven't had a chance yet to look into this, but I will soon.  So as Derek, as John Mason stated, is your checking account just a placeholder for all the subaccounts?  What John stated made sense to me and this is what I'll try first.

Again, thanks all of you for holding my hand through this!!  I greatly appreciate your help.  As I continue down this road I'm sure I'll have more questions.

Wayne
 

> From: warlord at MIT.EDU
> To: wrbird at hotmail.com
> CC: adardis at gmail.com; jmason at masondrywall.com; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Tracking Money in Savings Account
> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:09:24 -0500
> 
> Wayne Bird <wrbird at hotmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Thanks so much for your help!  I will continue to play around, and I'm sure I'll be back with more questions.
> >
> > Though I used the envelope system in the past, it seems that's not the
> > standard accounting method.  I tweaked MSMoney for years in order to
> > make it "act" like an envelope system and I don't want to tweak
> > GnuCash to do this, I'd rather just learn how GnuCash is designed to
> > be used and use it accordingly.
> 
> Define "standard accounting method"?  It's certainly one way that many
> people do it.  GnuCash doesn't need to be tweaked to do this.  In fact
> it's somewhat designed to support this!  See, for example, the "Open
> Subaccounts" option on the reconcile dialog.  This lets you reconcile
> a Bank Account with subaccounts.
> 
> You can also look at the Budget features of GnuCash, but I've never used
> them myself so I cannot comment on them.
> 
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
> -derek
> 
> -- 
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available