Accounting for customer payments through personal checking

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Brian wrote:

>I use a free online service that allows customers to pay with their debit
>card, but this service is linked to my personal checking account. As I get
>money in my personal checking through this service, I will periodically
>initiate a transfer to my business checking, but it is not an immediate
>transfer. How do I account for this in my business books, without making it
>look like I'm just contributing endless amounts of my own money to the
>business (i.e. through an Owner Contributions equity account)?
>  
>
If you were keeping your books the old fashioned way, pen and ink on 
paper, how would you do it? << what transactions would you have? >>
Do you see any reason why you could not be entering exactly the same 
transactions using gnucash?

If what you are asking is "what should those transaction be?" do you see 
that your question ISN'T really about gnucash.

I am putting it this way because you included "How do I account for this 
in my business books, without making it look like I'm just contributing 
endless amounts of my own money to the business (i.e. through an Owner 
Contributions equity account)?"

In other words, you don't know what the other side of the transaction 
"money coming in to my business account from my personal account for 
this reason " should be. Questions for you.

1) How did you record the original payment? Did you? Had you given any 
thought how that should be done? What accounts would be involved, 
whether you might not need a "owed to business by personal" account << 
those are common in small sole proprietorships and partnerships to 
distinguish small amounts intended to be temporary rather than changes 
in equity >>

2) If you didn't record the original transaction, how are you recording 
it now?

Michael

PS -- I hate to have to keep stressing this but what gnucash does for us 
is to partially automate the  error prone process of manual bookkeeping, 
eliminating the source of most errors. But it CAN'T supply the "how 
should I enter this transaction?" question. You STILL have to have a 
grasp of the fundamentals of bookkeeping for the sort of entity the 
books are being kept.