Don't understand imbalance

[Harold]

I don't record the credit card charges as I incur them. I don't use liabilities and then pay them. As I understand accounting (not very much) I am operating on a cash basis and therefore just pay the bills when then come in and are due. The check is made out to the credit card company but I split the total out to the different expense accounts. BTW this is not a business but my personal stuff. The splits are health insurance, books, and medical expenses. These splits add up to the amount of the credit card bill. Here is what it looks like:
Description                Account               Deposit          Withdrawal
credit card                                                                                    366.90
                                   health ins                        292.40
                                    books                                 12.00
                                   medical costs                    62.50
                                   bank account                                             366.90

Which 366.90 is the one not needed? Hope this comes thru sort of in the columns as I intended.

Thanks
Harold

--- On Fri, 11/21/08, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
From: Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>
Subject: Re: Don't understand imbalance
To: hh6199 at yahoo.com
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Date: Friday, November 21, 2008, 10:12 AM

> New to GnuCash. Coming over from Quickbooks. Running 2.2.6 under Mepis 8.0
beta 5. I have a split transaction where I paid a credit card bill. The first
row has the total amount in the withdrawal column. The split amounts are listed
in the deposit column. The split amounts equal the withdrawal amount. The next
row below the splits in the withdrawal column there is the same amount that is
in the withdrawal column on the first row. I have other split transactions but
this is the only imbalance that shows up when I open the imbalance account. Do I
need to delete this transaction and re-enter it or can I fix it to get rid of
the imbalance. Just guessing that the imbalance is not a good thing. 
> Thanks,
> Harold
>  
Imbalance very bad, something is wrong.

But I can't understand what you are describing. Normally paying a credit
card bill would not be a "split". You have an account of type credit
card (a sub type of liability) and you are writing a check (decreasing the
account of type "checking", a sub type of asset) and decreasing the
liability (you are decreasing both because assets and liabilities are on
opposite sides of the ledger). Though I could see that happening if you were
writing one check to pay the balances of several credit card accounts. Tell us
what are these splits. If you are trying to split expenses, wrong. Those you
record as of the date you made the credit card charges (you paid not in cash but
by assuming a liability) and not when you got around to paying the bill.

Michael