Newbies, account setup and manual reconciliation

[Jeff Smith]

Okay, when it comes to accounting I'm about as newbie as they come. You
have been warned. Neither my wife nor I are what you might call
accounting savants. For years, money has been the basis of heated
marital discussion but neither one of us is an authority, so the
arguments just go round and round.

I've finally decided to get informed and take a more 'hands on' attitude
to our money management. Well, truth be told, I've finally decided to
actually start managing it, rather than just waving goodbye to it as it
flies out the door. :-)

I've followed the various tutorials and hand-holding guides and got what
I think is a reasonable chart of accounts drawn up, and I've imported
about 18 months of available online banking history. (I hate paying
debit fees, but I love the granularity the age of debit-cards has
brought to my spending history.)

There is one area, however, that still befuddles me: Credit cards. I
have a category of liabilities called "Credit Cards", under which I have
a separate account for each card we have. In my checking account
register, I have transfers to those credit card accounts for each
payment made. These transfers show up in my QIF files from the checking
account. So far so good.

I am also downloading QIF statements from my credit card company, which
gives me all my granular transactions. Nifty. But I'm confused. At the
moment, I'm posting those credit card QIFs to the same gnucash account
that I transfer the payments to. The individual transactions get
allocated to my various expense accounts (food, toys, clothing etc.)

But I don't understand the accounting principles involved clearly enough
to be sure how the accounts SHOULD be set up. Do I just post all these
transactions to the credit card liability account? Or should I set up
individual "bank accounts" for each card, and transfer money from those
accounts to the categorized expense accounts for each transaction?

Any direction on the best way to manage this would be most welcome.

On another issue, is there a manual way to declare two records in the
system as "matching records" as a sort of manual reconciliation? There
are times when I'm importing records that I forget that a payment in the
credit card QIF should be matched to an outgoing transaction from my
checking account. So I end up with what appears to be a double payment.
What is the correct way AFTER doing the QIF import to fix these and tell
the system that they are two reports of the same transaction?

-- 
Jeff Smith