Paycheck Imbalance

[Peter]

I checked that the salary account is income, and it was marked as an
income account already, and my transaction looked like what you
describe.  I tried entering the transaction a couple other ways, but I
got the same result each time until I decided to ignore the tutorial.

I deleted the split transaction I entered before, and re-entered it from
within the salary account instead of from within my checking account
like the tutorial shows.  Also, this time I started with the gross pay
amount, and after entering all the withholdings from taxes I made the
remaining amount a deposit into my checking account.  Even though the
transactions look the same as they did the first time, it does not show
up as a negative imbalance for some reason.

Peter

On Sat, 2009-04-04 at 15:36 -0400, David Reiser wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2009, at 2:42 PM, Peter wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I just started using gnucash a couple weeks ago, so today was the  
> > first
> > time I tried entering a paycheck.  I followed the help tutorial on
> > entering it as a split transaction, and everything looks like it
> > balanced out (the amount in my checking account matches what gnucash
> > says it should be.)  When I went back to the list of accounts,  
> > though, I
> > now have an imbalance account with a negative amount for the amount of
> > the paycheck, and the same negative amount in the salary income  
> > account.
> > Is this the way it is supposed to work?  I thought the Income:Salary
> > account was a special account with an infinite supply of money that  
> > was
> > only there so you have a source for double entry.  Why should I care  
> > how
> > much less money my employer has?
> >
> > Peter
> 
> 
> It  isn't that you don't care about how much less your employer has,  
> but you (via the IRS) do care how much income you have.
> 
> Is your income account of type "Income"?
> 
> Looking at my checking account register, my paychecks have the gross  
> income amount in the right (Total Withdrawal) amount column and all  
> the deductions and net pay are in the left (Total Deposit) column.
> 
> Dave
> --
> David Reiser
> dbreiser at earthlink.net
> 
> 
> 
>