Cash vs Accrual Accounting and Cygwin/X

[ben-gnucash at xig.net]

I am not an accountant, so PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong about 
something basic here.  I'm sending this to the list half to help someone 
else out and half to see if someone else can improve on my plans!


To my knowledge, properly done, accrual accounting still keeps track of 
all the cash transactions and when they happen, I think all the relevant 
information is saved  in every account.  On reflection, I don't think 
anybody using GnuCash and invoices actually wants to use only cash 
accounting.  If you _really_ want to use cash accounting, just don't 
enter any invoices or such...

What _we_ want, at least, is to use accrual accounting internally, 
keeping track of invoices, etc,   Then we want to use cash accounting - 
based REPORTS for our taxes.  So we're seeking the minimal effort way to 
do BOTH, essentially.  It's possible you could just run reports on your 
bank accounts, but that seems kind of crude.

I do believe you can accomplish this goal reasonably easily by just 
adding accounts like  "cash invoices" - one to match every accrual 
account -   that get money transferred in from the  invoice account  
when a payment is made and immediately out to whereever the money 
'physically went'

But I'm very, very curious to hear if anybody else has any ideas.

Ben


Derek Atkins wrote:

>ben-gnucash at xig.net writes:
>
>  
>
>>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.
>>    
>>
>
>Unfortunately there isn't a good way to handle "invoice" and "cash
>accounting".  By definition, invoicing implies accrual..  We've had
>some discussions earlier about this.
>
>My original idea was to write a report that would discount unpaid
>invoices and remove the transactions from the balance sheet and P&L
>reports..  But that wouldn't put the transactions back in at the
>right place.
>
>The only other alternative is to chance the way invoices are posted
>in Cash v. Accrual accounting methods....
>
>-derek
>  
>