Huh? Starting out with gnucash (new accounts, etc)

[Andrew Wallace]

Ok, I admit it, I know next to nothing about accounting. I'm 
starting to pick it up, as I use gnucash to beat it into my 
head. At least that's the hope.

ANYway, I'm trying to set things up. Figuring out how to create
accounts was pretty easy, and I liked the "new user" druid. But,
I didn't have everything handy to have initial values for all 
the myriad accounts that were created.

The current thing that is blocking me is setting up a brokerage
account.

Create all the relevant commodities first (check)
Create "accounts" for each commodity in the brokerage account (check)
Create an account for cash on hand in the brokerage account (check)

but how to I assign the initial values? I have 60 shares of this
stock, and 32 of that one, and I can't figure out how to put this
information all in. I thought about putting "buy"
transactions in
place for each stock, using the correct date (that would be most
useful anyway), but the money has to come from somewhere... THis is
getting really confusing.

Any help (even if it's a pointer to some section of the documentation
that I missed) would be great. 

thanks,
andy


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