newbie credit balance confusion

Dave Peticolas dave@krondo.com
14 Jun 2001 13:32:43 -0700


On 14 Jun 2001 09:22:40 -0400, Sylvus Tarn wrote:
> 
> 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.

To get the standard accounting practice in regards to sign, you should
select "Credit" in the preferences dialog for the account types to 
reverse. However, this will not put the amounts in the correct column
in gnucash 1.4. For that, you need gnucash 1.6.

dave