Transfers between bank accounts?

[Maf. King]

On Friday 07 August 2009 05:38:13 Victoria_Stuart wrote:

>
> Basically, I entered my bank statement data into GnuCash, and when I
> reconciled it, the balance checked out.  However, I want to be sure I am
> entering the transactions accurately, especally as I am just starting out!
>

Hi Victoria,

Welcome to the list, and hopefully you'll get along with GC in time!

I've looked at your sceen grab, and it looks mostly OK, although I'm not an 
accountant.

One thing I would do with the bank charges is split the Service Fee and 
Interest charges into two different expense accounts - maybe something like
Expenses:Bank:Plan Fees
and
Expenses:Bank:Interest Charged

> I'm particularly uncertain how to go about entering transactions between my
> personal and my business bank accounts - I simply set this up as a transfer
> to an "Other Expenses" expense account that I made for this purpose,
> "Transfer from Persagen to Victoria."

That depends how you are treating the transfers, and indeed what purpose they 
serve.  It may help if you think of yourself and the company as two legally 
distinct entities, at least, in accounting terms 

Taking the transactions shown in the screen shot (2 off $25 deposits into the 
business)
Are they loans you are making to the company, repayments to the company of a 
loan already taken by you, or sales income?  (there may be other things that 
they could be, but hopefully, this will illustrate my point)

Case 1. You Loan the company $25.
that is a liability for the company.  It is still your money, the company is 
just "looking after" it for a while.  Therefore, it should be recorded as a 
transfer to (something like) Liabilities:LoanFromVictoria.

Case 2. You are repaying to the company - as above, execpet that the loan you 
owe should be an asset of the company.  A transaction will affect something 
like Assets:LoanToVictoria.

Case 3.  Pretty much as you have it here - lets say that you sold something to 
yourself, then you would bill yourself much as you would any other customer, 
and record the income as something like Income:sales. (Yes, there may be an 
effect on inventory/COGS, but GC doesn't _do_ inventory, so let's simplify a 
bit to get going!)


Any help, or just more confusing?


>
> Also, I don't know why there are the two extra lines at the end (the last
> transaction appears to be split, for some reason, twice)?!


Looks to me like you've accidently put in a couple of blank lines in a 
transaction.  What do you see in the register if you select one of those 
splits (and click the split button on the toolbar, if auto-split is off)?

HTH,
Maf.

>
> I'd appreciate any comments.
>
> Thanks, Victoria  :-)