Reconciling credit card (liability) accounts

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Ashvin Goel <ashvin at acm.org> writes:

> I have a problem with reconciling my credit card (liability) accounts
> that doesn't seem to occur with my bank (asset) accounts. With a
> credit card account, when reconciling the account, I put the "Cleared"
> amount in the ending balance when the first reconcile window pops
> up. On pressing "Ok", I get the second reconcile window that shows
> that the difference is 0.00. This is expected behavior. Then I press
> the "Finish" button and now a "Transfer Funds" window pops up that
> asks me to transfer the same "Cleared" amount from one of my bank
> accounts to this credit card account. I think this latter window is
> incorrect because the second reconcile window shows that everything is
> reconciled correctly (difference is zero). This problem does not occur
> when reconciling my bank account. Does anybody else have a similar
> problem or is there something wrong I am doing?

This isn't a problem; it's a FEATURE..   It's helping you record
the payment on the credit card, assuming you're paying off the whole
balance.  It doesn't happen on a Bank reconciliation because you're
never expected to "pay off" a bank account.  ;)

The expected process is:

1) Credit Card Bill arrives
2) You reconcile the bill against your account in gnucash
3) You pay the bill (and enter the payment transaction in gnucash).

The transfer window is just gnucash's helpful way to handle step 3.

> Ashvin

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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