newbie credit balance confusion

[Sylvus Tarn]

Many thanks for all your kind support.

Troubles:  Um, I'm not certain.

I read the documentation again, and discovered that (duh) the way the
program balances debit and credit accounts is by making credit
accounts negative.   (If it isn't obvious already, I'm not a
programmer, and hadn't really thought about how the program is made
to work.)  There was also a thread in the archives about "reverse
balance accounts" (I spent several hours rereading the documentation
and archives yesterday) that made more sense this time around.

It seems to me that what I want is standard accounting practice with
regard to sign; that is, for all my credit accounts with normal
balances to be positive.  Currently a lot of them do not have normal
balances, because I haven't finished making entries, so those I want
to be negative until I do.  As far as I can tell exactly the opposite
is true; all my credit (owner equity, income, liability) accounts with
normal balances have negative numbers, reflecting the program's
internal math (I think).  I have the program preferences for reverse
balance types set to none, which at least means I don't have some
credit accounts negative and some positive, like the default, which I
find really confusing.

None of the options in the preferences seem to give me what I
want...maybe it doesn't exist yet?  Or perhaps only shows up in the
reports (which I haven't really learned to use)?  However, the docs
make clear that the program works fine even with negative nos. for
paychecks, owner equity and the like, which was my biggest concern:
this difficulty has thus been downgraded from Major Concern to Minor
Nit.  I can get used to the negative numbers, or maybe someday beg the
wizard to change this (if the development team hasn't already).  I
should note that I appear to have been successfully upgraded to 1.6.

I realize I should've noticed negative income comment the *first* (or
even second or third) time I read the docs, but I learn *very* slowly,
and I'm much better at art than computer programs, anyway.

I hope I am making sense, and I *really* appreciate and thank all the
effort gone into making this program, a true double entry, *with*
journaling capabilities (Quicken's lack of which finally kicked me
over).  It's so nice not to have to fire up the other machine, and
then fire up windoze on vm-ware, just to do my accounting.

many thanks,

sylvus tarn