`Balance' dialog box.. what is it for.

Dave Reed drlinux at columbus.rr.com
Thu Aug 5 12:43:14 EDT 2004


On Thursday 05 August 2004 01:04, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Bill Wisse <wiswp at niue.nu> writes:
> 
> >> Lets not get too silly with our comments.
> >
> > Sorry to say Harry , but apply this to yourself first.
> 
> Have you seen many text editors that can do check book accounting,
> math, recurring payments, generate reports etc.  No .. becasue its
> silly to think they could.  I didn't recommend Wiggins be shot for it
> only not to get carried away.
> 
> I've said nothing silly about the gnucash software.  The one reference
> I made was that it was `very powerfull'.  The desire to be able to
> easily do simple checkbook accounting may be primative by gnucash
> standards but is not silly.  I properly thanked the posters for there
> time. Particulary Josh Sled.  What exactly did you find silly?
> 
> They represent the first take of a layman who is at least somewhat
> computer savvy.

I'm not going to get involved in the argument, but if all you want to
do is track what's in you're checking account and you really want to
use gnucash, you could create one cash account for your checkbook and
one income or expense account and have every transaction use that
other account as the account that every checkbook transaction
references. I would recommend you go one step further and create three
accounts:

one "cash" account for you checking account
one "income" account for deposits
one "expense" account for withdrawals

Maybe then if/when you start looking at the reports, you'll start to see
how double-entry accounting works and appreciate it if you do want to
track things more accurately. And then you can eventually create
subaccounts for different income and expense categories if you ever
feel the need to track things in detail.

I personally track expenses that affect my taxes exactly and a couple
other things that I might want to see how they change over time such
as utilities and then have an "Expenses:Other" account that I use for
most expenses. I track my income sources with great detail because
those are needed for tax purposes. And I also used it to track my
assets including retirement accounts and the few individual stocks I
own. Once you fully understand double-entry accounting and the
capabilities of gnucash, you'll realize how much it can do for you
with a relatively small amount of data entry on your part (once you're
recurring transactions are "memorized" by gnucash).

Dave




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