Expense accounts etc...

[Yawar Amin]

Hi,

On 2010-11-07, at 21:48, Dennis Powless wrote:

> […]
> 
> I do have an issue with transactions in the checking account.  I was
> going to re-enter all the old transactions and do splits, but on the
> other accounts they show up as unreconsiled transactions.  Is there
> anyway to change this?  Or, will it mess up the reconsilation process?

You mean GC is showing them as unbalanced transactions? That is they don’t satisfy the double entry balancing requirement? Or that they’re not reconciled as in they have not been verified to match bank statements?

If the former, could you give some representative examples of unbalanced transactions you see, changing account names and dollar values to protect your personal info?

If the latter, you want to do reconciliation but that’s another matter after making sure all your data is imported correctly.

>> […]
> 
> So, right now I have over 300,000 in some expenses and rising, this
> counts as negative balance or positive?  Somewhat confused on this….

If you’re seeing these figures in the main Accounts tab, these are aggregated figures over all your years of keeping financial records. Expense accounts have a normal debit balance, so if you see positive amounts in those accounts, that means they are debit balances, which means they are subtracted from your income to give the change in your net worth over a period of time (generally a year). So it’s not really useful to think about the total aggregated income and expense values for all time. You’d run reports in GC to figure out changes in your net worth over more useful time periods.

>> […]
> 
> Ok, what I mean is I might go back to quicken and redo the
> transactions with splits and proper expenses etc... then do an import.
> Might be easier than doing it in gnucash, I think?

Yes, you might get better results. But before you do that, back up whatever GnuCash data you have now, and then try it out the new way. Then you can always back-pedal to a known-good data file if something goes wrong.

>> Hope this helps,
>> 
>> Yawar

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