Cash vs Accrual Accounting and Cygwin/X

[ben-gnucash at xig.net]

1.  Liz, I HUGELY appreciate learning that gnucash only does accrual 
accounting before we tried to figure out too hard how to make cash work.


2.  On the other hand, I don't like your solution at all.  For instance, 
if you "miss" something and that far-future date elapses it'll appear in 
your cash accounting totals when it shouldn't.   If you'll forgive my 
lack of accounting vocabulary I think a much better solution is 
something like:

Create an account for "unpaid invoices" 
When you issue an invoice, add it here.  When the invoice is paid, 
transfer the money from "unpaid invoices" to whatever "real" account 
you're actually getting paid in.  The "unpaid" account is never part of 
your totals as long as you're doing cash accounting; but you also get 
the benefit of being able to see everything using both ways of 
accounting.  (In addition, the unpaid account should always have a $0 
actual balance - because whenever something is actually paid that amount 
gets transfered to the other, real account.)

I'm open to the idea that this isn't perfect either, but I don't think 
putting in future dates is a very safe solution at all.


3.  Using GnuCash in Windows.    Cygwin/X runs GnuCash beautifully over 
SSH from my linux server.  This is really an ideal bookkeeping solution, 
because my bookkeeper and I can both see the most current data from 
anywhere using strong encryption.

With the singular exception of using -Y instead of -X, the instructions 
from two days ago were beautiful and perfect.


And Derek - condolances.


Ben