Usage question: equity balance not reflecting change in asset balance

[Dominic Ashton]

2009/4/19 Simon West <s.d.c.west at googlemail.com>:
> Hi Dominic,
>
> The Equity is actually not supposed to change when you record expenses
> coming out of your checking account. In fact if you're using Gnucash for
> personal accounts it is unlikely that you'll use an Equity account again
> after using it for opening balances. When you start out, you need to put
> money into your checking account, but because we're using double-entry
> accounting that money must come from a different account, since all
> transactions must take place in two accounts. By convention, an
> Equity:Opening Balance account is usually used for this, but don't get hung
> up on the name, you could just call it Initial Balances if you wanted. From
> then on, you shouldn't need to look at the Opening Balance account again,
> unless you want to remind yourself how much money you had when you started
> using Gnucash.
>
> Simon
>
>
>
>
> On 18 Apr 2009, at 03:16, Dominic Ashton wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I have set up GNUCASH using the user guide supplied with the software,
>> and part of that involved me inputting:
>>
>> Opening balance $2000
>>
>> etc. in my checking account etc. The account I transferred to was
>> "Equity: Opening balance"
>>
>> And everything was balanced and fine. However, now after I have added
>> a number of expenses, although the balance of my checking account etc.
>> is showing up correctly, the equity is still showing the previous
>> balance (as if the expenses never happened).
>>
>> I went through the tutorial again:
>>
>> http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.0/C/gnucash-guide/txns-puttoget1.html#txns-puttoget-add2
>> and the same phenomena can be witnessed in the tutorial, where the
>> assets are 1781.79, the liabilities are 500 dollars, but the equity is
>> 1500 dollars. However, no reference is made to this in the
>> documentation.
>>
>> I'm sure this must be really really simple, but a quick scan of the
>> documentation and a google search did not reveal anything. Can someone
>> point me to the correct page in the docs?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Dominic
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>

Mike, Simon,

Thank you very much for you replies.

The software so far has been a dream to use; very intuitive. I can see
the hardest part will be getting used to accounting conventions!

Thanks,

Dominic