Setting up Student Loan and Debts

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 18:53 +0800, Wouter van Marle wrote:

> On 11 Mar 07, at 6:17, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> 
> > been using GnuCash to manage my own finances for a little bit now.  
> > What
> > I have done (and what seems to be the "standard" thing to do) is to 
> > work
> > in terms of a year.  So, I keep my file which starts on 1-1-2007, and 
> > no
> > transaction in that file are dated before that.  That means that
> 
> I don't  think this is a standard thing - on the contrary. This may 
> work if you have only incomes and expenses, it will go horribly wrong 
> if you start working with A/P and A/R. No idea how to "roll over" those 
> to a new year. Besides that I wouldn't  know why you want to split it 
> up in the first place. Only more work, and risk of errors in the new 
> year start.


It would be more work to re-enter A/P and A/R transaction-by-transaction
at the start of the year, I would think.  You roll them over to new
books (since you keep books for a fiscal year, which, at least in the
U.S. for individuals is the calendar year) in their net amounts, and
depend on the previous year's records for the detail, I would think.  If
that weren't the case, I wouldn't think there would be any reason to
retain those records.


> As you appear to have many loans, maybe you can use the loan druids for 
> this. I've never worked with them myself but I know there are options 
> for this in GnuCash, at least for mortgages (which is basically a 
> special kind of loan). But then again you can't start splitting your 
> files in separate years as these loans will run to next year(s).


Yeah, I tried the loan druid thing, and it doesn't work; I have to enter
my payments manually to get the right amount of interest/principal
marked as paid.  GnuCash doesn't seem to do it properly, but I can't
identify why... I just know that it doesn't do it right, so I do it by
hand.

It seems, by the way, that GnuCash is particularly for this type of
splitting.  You can, in Preferences, set the start/end dates for the
file, which is usually the "Start of this year" and "End of the year,"
since a year is the generic accounting period (at least, as I understand
it).

    — Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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