withdrawals/deposits

[Jim Douglas]

You're right it is Terminology Confusion on my part.

Now that I understand what "Imbalance" is for I have been researching and resolving entries as I go.

Most of my issues are accounting related.  An issue I am having right now is what account to "Transfer".  I have two Interest Accounts, 'Credit Card' and a 'Brokerage Account with a Margin Debt'.  Do I Transfer to my "Fee Income" so it deduced from that account?

If this is not the correct list do you know of a list I can post these types of questions to?

Jim

> Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:46:24 -0400
> From: stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
> To: warlord at MIT.EDU
> CC: jdz99 at hotmail.com; gnucash-user at lists.gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: withdrawals/deposits
> 
> 
> >Create a transaction from Equity:Opening Balances into this account.
> > From your Checking it would be a Deposit.
> >  
> >
> Terminology confusion?
> 
> Yes you might be entering this transaction into the column which for a 
> checking account might have a title of "deposits". But the transaction 
> itself isn't a "deposit" and so the description should be something like 
> "opening balance". You might have other transactions that increase the 
> balance of your checking account that are not "deposits" per se. For 
> example, that might be an interest paying account in which when you 
> enter these the description would be "interest". When you do make a 
> deposit, then "deposit" would be the correct description entry.
> 
> Similarly with the other side. You write checks against this account and 
> here the description usually the payee. You may also have bank 
> charges/fees, charges for a supply of new checks, interest charges for 
> overdrafts, etc. All these go into the :withdrawals" column but the 
> descriptions are different.
> 
> I think part of the confusion is with the system trying to help you with 
> what are (usually) more meaningful titles than simply "debits" and 
> "credits".
> 
> Again I have to say it --- a computerized accounting system like GnuCash 
> is MOST useful assuming that you already know something about standard 
> bookkeeping. It can't tell you what to do. What you need to understand 
> that when doing it the old fashioned way pen and ink on paper 99% of the 
> errors are transcription errors and errors in arithmetic and the 
> computerized systems do "posting" and "arithmetic" perfectly and 
> immediately detect if you have entered a transaction out of balance. But 
> GnuCash (nor any other such system) can't prevent you from doing it "all 
> wrong".
> 
> Michael
> 
> NOTE: You are perhaps imagining a multicolumn account of the sort used 
> in old fashioned bookkeeping known as a "cash book" which in addition to 
> a fundamental pair of debit/credit columns had columns reserved for (and 
> with suitable titles) for the most common accounts against which petty 
> cash transaction would take place. The reason for this is precisely the 
> many errors that took place in posting transcription as this method 
> reduced the amount of "posting" that took place (only the totals of the 
> columns would be posted each period). In other words, a business didn't 
> want to have to post separately each time the office secretary went out 
> and bought stamps from petty cash but once a month or whenever to total 
> of the "postage" column got posted to the ledger.

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