Credit Balance on new Expense Account

[Ariel]

You have at least 3 options (in reverse order of complexity):

You can do it completely off the books, like this:

Start the telephone account with a 0 balance, but artificially add (in the 
opening balance) the same (extra) dollars to your checking account.

Everything will balance then, but you'll have to put in "fake" payments 
from checking to telephone as each bill comes in until the credit is 
drained.

Don't forget to make adjustments when Reconciling your checking account.

Option 2:

Put a negative opening balance (dated 12/31/06) into your telephone 
account, then set gnucash to show you data starting from the beginning of 
the year.

Option 3:

Each time you "pay" a bill to your telephone account, transfer the funds 
from Opening Balance, until the overpayment is drained, and you have to 
start moving money from checking instead. (You'll probably have to do a 
split transaction during the month the account switches from over to 
under.)

I'd go with #3.

 	-Ariel

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Tad Marko wrote:

> Right, except that the actual over payment occured before the
> beginning of my accounting period (1/1/07) out of an account that has
> a beginning balance at that date. Maybe I can just enter the previous
> transaction on its actual date and then make a counter deposit to the
> affected checking account from the opening balance account?
>
> Tad
>
> On Fri, Jan 12, 2007 at 10:13:37AM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> You do this the exact same way as anything else.  Just effectively
>> "over pay" the expense.
>>
>> -derek
>>
>> Quoting Tad Marko <tad at tadland.net>:
>>
>>> Howdy!
>>>
>>> I've started this year getting all my finances into GnuCash, so I have
>>> all of my accounts starting at 1/1/2007. Whatever balances they have
>>> at that moment is the beginning balance I enter them with. This is
>>> working fine for credit card and bank accounts, but I have a telephone
>>> bill that I overpaid by quite a bit last year so on 1/1/2007, it has a
>>> substantial negative balance. I would like to track the new bills at
>>> they whittle down this balance, showing them paid against this balance
>>> until it is depleted. What is the best way to reflect this?  I'm
>>> thinking that I may have to turn this into an asset account, which I
>>> really don't want to do for this unusual circumstance.
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