Equity vs liability

[Geert Janssens]

Thank you all for your replies.

I can summarize this as follows:
* Depending on your country, the accounting equation is formulated slightly 
differently. You can have
Assets = Equity + Liability
or
Assets = Passive
Passive = Equity + Liability

* The math in both cases remains the same.

Applied in GnuCash:
* The Balance sheet in English speaks of "Equity & Liabilities", in certain 
other countries this would be called "Passive"
* The account tree doesn't know the concept of "Passive", it only knows the 
separate "Equity" and "Liabilities".
* There is no strict need for a separate "Passive" account type, since it's 
only meant to group Equity and Liabilities such that the account tree is a 
better representation of the accounting equation.
* If you want to have a placeholder account "Passive" to contain both Equity 
and Liabilities accounts, you're out of luck currently. GnuCash doesn't have 
an account type that can contain both at the same time. For those interested, 
there is a bug report for this: 
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421766

But again, it's only a matter of representation. I would have liked the 
ability to organize my account tree to reflect the general balance structure 
as used here. Oh, well, that won't be possible right now, perhaps in the 
future.

Geert