Newbie's experience with gnucash

Eric Schwartz emschwar@rmi.net
Mon, 16 Oct 2000 11:45:52 -0600


At 08:24 AM 10/16/00 -0500, Bill Gribble wrote:
>First of all, forget that you ever heard the word "double entry".
>Yes, it's there, but it's more an implementation detail than something
>you have to worry about directly.  All you need to remember is that
>what Quicken calls "Categories", gnucash calls "accounts", and what
>Quicken calls "Accounts", gnucash also calls accounts :), and
>furthermore, every financial entry has to have a "category" in
>addition to the bank account that it's drawn from.

And that's what I don't get-- with Quicken, it's a transaction that has the 
attribute
"car payment" attached to it.  I just record having spent, say, $261.01 for 
my car
payment, slap the label "car payment" on it, and bob's yer uncle.  All of a 
sudden,
it seems I just created a "Car Payment" account somewhere that I neither 
want, nor
care about.  All I need to know is what happened with my checking account.

>Second, keep in mind that Gnucash isn't just "free Quicken".

I know that, but I want to use it for the same things I use Quicken for, so
I'm running into a lot of questions along those lines.  I don't want to just
<whine>make it just like Quicken!</whine>, but the desire to do the same sorts
of things with it is what's informing most of my problems.

>It's a
>different program, one that has similar goals but not exactly
>identical, and you have to reconcile yourself to the idea that there
>will be a bit of a learning process while you get used to this new
>piece of software.  Just because you are an Adobe Photoshop expert
>doesn't mean you can just open up Illustrator and start working;
>different programs have different paradigms, even if they are
>superficially similar.

Right.  And I'm not even remotely close to a Quicken expert.  I'm just 
trying to say that
it works the way I expect things to, and gnucash doesn't.  So I can either 
adjust my
expectations (which is what I'm trying to do, as soon as I figure out where 
to adjust them
to), or change gnucash, or both (which is really the right answer, I think).



> > * Set the opening balance of my accounts.
> >
> > This is where double-entry bookkeeping rears its ugly head.  I don't
> > understand how to say, "This account started off having this much
> > money in it."  When I do that, it creates an "Imbalance-USD" account
> > with the opposite amount of money as I just put in my checking and
> > savings accounts.
>
>It's a good question, and one that will be swept under the rug when we
>have a better new-account setup routine.  Gnucash (like accountants,
>and normal people like you) understands that there are times when
>money just "appears" from outside the scope of your accounting
>procedures.  This type of money is called "Equity".  Opening balances
>are generally considered to be transfers from an account called
>"Retained Earnings" which is of type "Equity".  If you want, you can
>call the account "Opening Balances", and just think of this as a
>special category for opening balances that doesn't show up on income
>and expense reports.  There is a reason it's called Retained Earnings
>by accountants, having to do with the rollup of expenses and income,
>but that won't really affect you if you prefer the name Opening
>Balances.

But how does the money get in this "Retained Earnings" (or Opening Balances,
if I prefer) in the first place?  It has to come from somewhere, doesn't 
it?  It seems
like gnucash wants a closed system of money, where all there ever is is the 
money
you start with, and that's it.  How do I say "Somebody just gave me 
money.  I never had
this money before, but it suddenly appeared out of thin air."?

I shudder to think of the questions I'm going to have once my next paycheck 
comes in, and
I try to record *that*!

> > Then I go to the Categories tab.  It has the exactsame number of
> > transactions as were in my checking QIF file.  It wants a GNUCash
> > Account Name.  Why?  What's this for?  I don't get it.
>
>Gnucash calls Quicken Categories "accounts".  You need to have an
>Income or Expense account for each Income or Expense category in
>Quicken, and this screen shows how they are related to each other.

Er, why?  As far as I'm concerned, it's just "money goes into (or out of) 
of my account,
and I put this label on it to remind me what it was.  Furthermore, the QIF 
file I get from my
bank doesn't have category information in it, as best I can see.

>What you told Gnucash was that you wanted to merge all of your Quicken
>Categories into one called "Random".

But why do I want to do that?  They're already recorded in my Checking 
account correctly;
why do I need to have their inverses recorded anywhere?  As long as my 
Checking account
balances, the rest of it can go hang, as far as I care.

>   I doubt that was what you wanted
>to do.  If you just left the defaults alone, you would have ended up
>with a direct mapping of all your Quicken categories to Gnucash ones
>of the same name.

Except there were no Quicken categories to start with, as best I can figure.

>If you buy food with money from your bank, the amount of Food goes up
>and the amount in Bank goes down.

But why do I care about the amount of Food?  I'm not tracking Food, I'm 
tracking
money.

>It's really no
>different from the way Quicken presents it to you, except that instead
>of moving money from your bank into your Food expense category you
>move it into your Food expense account.

But Quicken doesn't require me to move money into a category; it just lets 
me debit my
bank account by a certain amount, and tag it "food", so I can later say, 
"total all the
transactions labeled 'food'" to see how much money I spend on food.  This 
is vastly simpler
than having to create a new account to keep track of every single kind of 
thing I buy.

>BTW, Chris Browne and others have written documentation of all of this
>stuff which is available as on-line help in gnucash.  The help in the
>QIF importer has a description of the categories and accounts issue,
>which might be a good place to start if the above isn't helpful.

I spent about two hours getting increasingly frustrated with that 
documentation before I wrote
to the list. :)  It seems ideally designed for someone with an accounting 
background, but for
someone like me, it's all Greek.

-=Eric