Newbie's experience with gnucash

[Eric Schwartz]

At 02:36 PM 10/16/00 -0400, Lauren Matheson wrote:
>But money doesn't appear out of thin air (at least where I live, if it 
>does where
>you do then send directions).

Right, but everyone says "Create an Income account and transfer money from 
that",
but nobody seems to address the problem of how the money gets *in* that account
in the first place.  That's what confuses me-- apparently, all my money is 
supposed to
show up as transfers from something else, but nobody will tell me how it 
should get
there in the first place!  See my reply to Bill on the list; I think I'm 
beginning to
understand how these things work, but it's very shaky, and I don't see any 
task-based
documentation.

In fact, I'd say that's my biggest complaint-- and it's generic to free 
software, not just
gnucash, so that's no big deal.  There's lots of reference-based documentation
(like, "here's a list of account types"), but not much task-based documentation
(like, "How do I get started keeping track of my $ with gnucash?").  But if 
I ever figure
this out (hyperbole; I'm sure I will, eventually, if you all don't strangle 
me first), I'll be
happy to write some of this documentation, so that other poor newbies like 
me don't get
so horribly confused.

> > But why do I care about the amount of Food?  I'm not tracking Food, I'm
> > tracking money.
>
>and your food expense.  if you didn't care where your money went to you 
>wouldn't
>create different 'categories', you'd just have one called "spent it somewhere"

Okay, I think I've reconciled myself to pretending accounts are really 
categories, except
when they're really accounts.  It sounds like the best way for someone like 
me to organize
this might be to create an account called "Categories" of type Expense, and 
create all the
things that I think of as categories as sub-accounts under that.  Does that 
make sense?

>it's really the same, you have to create new categories for everything you 
>buy in
>quicken.  now, quicken will create them on the fly for you but gnucash will do
>that soon too.  your food account is kind of like having an always upto date
>category report for food.

Hrm, okay, then it sounds like my idea above makes more sense then.  I 
think having these
things automatically created would work for the vast majority of people 
using something like
gnucash-- even better would be if there were a way to hide them so they 
didn't appear at
all unless I specifically wanted to see them (collapsing the main category 
above is a start,
but I don't want to even see that-- it should be behind-the-scenes, as far 
as I'm concerned,
until I specifically want to see it).

-=Eric