Credit Card

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
>I'd suggest that you make the card account in GC of type "Credit Card" rather 
>than "Liability" - you get more intuitive column labels and so on.
>
>You may wish to make a parent account of type liability, to hold this and any 
>future cards, loans or liabilities all in one place, but that is up to what 
>makes you comfortable.
>
>  
>
Sorry about that. My way of thinking (old fashioned accounting) there 
are only three fundamental types, asset, liability, and equity.

I meant of course that it would be in the "liability" tree. If you had 
several credit card accounts, then as a child of "liabilities" you might 
have an account called "credit cards" and your individual credit card 
accounts would be children of it. New to accounting you can use all the 
cues you can get, like columns labeled "charges" and "payments" instead 
of just debits and credits. But those of us who learned accounting the 
old fashioned way on paper, just specially ruled paper and you had to 
remember which sorts of accounts got entered which side of the ledger page.

NOTE --- just makes it easier for the MAJORITY of your entries. 
Ordinarily most entries in the "charges" column would be charges (only 
once a billing cycle interest and fees). Similarly most of the entires 
on the payment side MIGHT be payments. Or maybe not? After all, not 
likely to make more than one payment a month and you could have several 
"refund" credits for merchandise returns, etc. I don't keep our personal 
accounts on GnuCash (don't bother using any "system" for personal 
accounting), but if I did, payments would NOT be the majority type of 
entry in that column in our case.