Some basic 2.01 questions...

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Thu Nov 9 14:30:52 EST 2006


Quoting Brian Keener <brikeener at gmail.com>:

> Actually, it's probably more of a "double-entry accounting" question...
>
> So I've got the basics down so far; every payday, I transfer money from
> "Income:Salary" to my main checking account, and as I pay bills/write checks
> I transfer money from checking to expense:auto:gas etc. etc. etc.
>
> Now, that leaves me with ever-increasing values in my expenses columns and
> income columns, which looks a little strange to me.  That's pretty much to
> be expected, I assume?

Yes, that's to be expected.

> But what about a few months/years/whatever down the road, is it really
> useful to know I spent $15,823 in gasoline since November 2006?  Can those
> values be filtered so that only the last month or so shows up?
>
> I suppose I could just hide the "income" listings and not worry about it,
> which is pretty much what I assume will happen...

When you run the Income Statement report (what used to be called the
P&L or Profit and Loss report), you can set the timeframe; this will
show you only the Income and Expense for that timeframe which is what
you want to see.

If you really really care about what you see in the Chart of Accounts
you can manually add zero-ing transactions to each Income and Expense
account back to Equity:Retained Earnings to "clear out" the balances.

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available



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