account organization

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 12:38:32PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I'm not sure what you mean..  Say you start recording your information
> as of 1 January 2003; you set an opening balance txn dated 31 Dec
> 2002.  By definition you are ignoring all transactions that occur
> prior to 1 Jan 2003, so why are you even trying to enter transactions
> before your opening date?
> 
> I guess I just don't understand what you are trying to do...  If what
> you are trying to do is incrementally add historic transactions to
> Gnucash, well, yea, you can't (easily) do that

Well, that would be reason enough for me.  I started by entering my
recent data, but I want to get back to the beginning of last year
before I file my taxes.  :-)

Here's another reason.  Say I want my opening balances to coincide
with statements dates.  I decide to start with my 2002-01-15 credit
card statement and my 2002-01-05 checking statement, and enter the
respective opening balances on those dates.  While entering my
checking account transactions, I find I paid my credit card balance
on 2002-01-10, which screws up the balance on my credit card
account.

The answer is simply to pick the same opening date for all accounts.
But I find that inconvenient for personal accounting.  I think most
home users would prefer to use a statement date, so they don't have
to compute the opening balances by hand.

Andrew