cannot put an income account inside an equity account
Mike or Penny Novack
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Thu Apr 18 09:08:24 EDT 2013
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>I cannot put an income account inside an equity account. Is this a bug? I am running gnucash 2.4.12
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>Regards,
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>Michael
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You are not supposed to be able to.
Fundamental double entry bookkeeping and its history.
In the earliest days (many centuries ago) income and expense
transactions did not have their own account categories but were
immediately posted against equity. That gave immediate feedback as to
the current state of equity but zero information about income and
expense. Then somebody got the bright idea of having temporary accounts
of type income and equity and only closing them to equity every so often
(either temporarily on a "trial" basis or for real with "close the
books" for the period). That meant being able to see in detail the
income and expense amounts and then the effect on equity at each end of
accounting period.
With an application like gnucash you don't have to do all the work of
those trial or for real closings as gnucash can generate the reports for
you (the "profit and loss" for the specified time interval as well as
balance sheets for the start and end of the period)
Michael
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