Accounting Question

[Bobby Goins]

This is an update to my post below.

Going back to MS Money to see what is going on with the 401(k) entries,
I found that Money's 401(k) wizard will "add shares" instead of buying
shares.  I think that the reason that this was done this way is because
statements from 401(k) managers often do not show the purchase price of
the shares.  The statement only shows the old quantity, the new quantity
and the fund's value at the time the report was created.

We don't know the purchase price of the fund!!!!

As for the monies in the cash account, the report will show that the
cash account is lessened, but does not let us know how the monies were
dispersed. In other words, the money leaves the cash account without a
category to go to.  We know that the money is used to buy funds, but in
MS Money the funds go into 'never-never land'.

Without a payee or a category/account, gnucash places this lessening of
the cash account to 'retained earnings'.  And this is part of the reason
why my equity:retained earnings account is so large.

***

How would the readers of this list handle these 'homeless' cash
disbursements in gnucash???    

***

Now to figure out the re-finance issue..... 


On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 15:48, Bobby Goins wrote:
> Thanks to Derek Atkins and Dan Black for their help with the docs and 
> icons.
> ---
> 
> After I imported the QIF files from MS Money 2001 into gnucash-1.8.7, I 
> had to deal with where to fit these accounts within the gnucash account 
> structure.  Most the the accounts seem to fit well, however, there are 
> some that didn't quite make sense to me.  
> 
> Some of the account balances are not the same in Money and gnucash.  I 
> think the issues reflect the different philosophies between the two 
> programs.  Primarily, the issues deal with the closing of 'old accounts' 
> and the subsequent opening of 'new accounts', and how to deal with 
> investment accounts such as 401(k) plans and Roth IRA accounts.  
> 
> When I imported my files, I had a 'retained earnings' account that was 
> in the several hundred dollar range.  Looking through it showed 'open 
> balance' items for accounts that I closed and opened.  An example would 
> be the re-financing of my house.  I have an opening balance line for 
> the 'old mortgage' and an opening balance line for the 'new mortgage'.
> How should I reflect this in gnucash?
> 
> I also had lines within the 'retained earnings' account for a 401(k) 
> account that seemed to correspond to monthly withdraws from my 
> paycheck.  I would think that this should be an 'investment cash' 
> account.  I receive a quarterly statement from the 401(k) manager that 
> shows when and where this cash account has a withdraw to actually buy 
> the mutual funds.  At that point, I historically reduced the cash 
> account and increased the actual investment account.  Is this the way 
> this should be reflected in gnucash?
> 
> Also, MS Money reported the 'value' of these type of accounts as the sum 
> of the purchase value, unrealized losses/gains and the cash account 
> value.  How would I do this in gnucash?
> 
> With nearly 5 years of data in my QIF files, making these corrections 
> seems like a frightening task.
> 
> 
>