How much detail?

[Josh Sled]

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 09:58, Phil Scherzinger wrote:

> 1.  How granular should I be?  I am using this for home record
> keeping.  No business, just household expenses.  So, when I go to
> Walmart, and buy a boat load of things ranging from groceries to
> hardware, how granulated should I be when posting it?

The level of detail in expense-accounts presented in sample account
trees [in the "New File" dialog] seems like a pretty good tradeoff for
complexity vs. "accounting".

But it's really up to you.  If those are too low-level, then just create
a few Expense:<...> sub-categories.  If they're too high-level, then
create a deep tree.

For instance, I've started to break my groceries [both supermarket and
"club"] into a few sub-categories to account for:

* normal consumable groceries [meat, eggs, broccoli, beer, &c.]
* pet expenses
* housewares + healty&beauty
* [entertainment, on the rare occasion I buy a video game...]

... this leads to a /bit/ more data-entry, but gives me the level of
detail I like.  And the interface makes the data-entry pretty cheap, so
I consider it worth it.

> 2.  In quicken, I do a lot of online bank like downloading
> transactions, paying bills, and generally managing my checking
> accounts.  With Gnucash, do I need to download these transactions,
> save them, then import them into my existing accounts?

Yes; manually download the statement in OFX or QIF format, and import
the file via GnuCash.

...jsled

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