General Journal

[cgw993 at aol.com]

Hi,

I am new to GNU software in general and am a big supporter of the FSF ideas.
Gnucash looks like it will be very useful.   I have also recently decided to
learn the basics of bookkeeping as is taught in a textbook or by a teacher
instead of as is taught by quickbooks or some other proprietary software.

 

 

Most people I would guess do not have a basic understanding of bookkeeping
principals or the accounting equation.   This is just my opinion but I
believe that you cannot keep books unless you have this basic understanding.
The software makers, to some extent this includes Gnucash, seem to try to
bypass bookkeeping fundamentals and to create their own system in order to
"simplify" the process for people that are not familiar with the basics of
bookkeeping.   I strongly believe this is not a good practice and that this
will cause more failures than successes in helping people to keep their own
books.  But I could be wrong, I did just after all learn some basic things
about bookkeeping recently.

 

 

The very first thing that I was taught to do, and what I assume is taught by
most textbooks, is to become familiar with the concept of the General
Journal.    This is probably the most critical step in the entire
bookkeeping process.   It is during this step that the nature of the
transaction and the amounts involved first enter the bookkeeping system.
It is also at this step that the user can easily verify that the transaction
is balanced.     In order to become familiar with how to use the general
journal, one has to practice with transaction analysis problems.   An
example transaction analysis problem -   

 

You buy $73 of groceries with your checking account -

 

Debit Account - Expense Groceries $73

Credit Account - Checking $73

 

What happens if instead you use a credit card to make the purchase?  What
about if you used cash, spent $80, paid $73 for groceries and tipped $7 to
the person who helped carry the bags to the car?  Understanding how to enter
this into the general journal is critical and in fact all over steps pretty
much take care of themselves after this point.

 

Why in the world accounting software would want to bypass the General
Journal in some way.   Almost all software seems to intentionally do this.
The General Journal is the most important part of the bookkeeping process.
Why would you want to skip this step and go right to the General Ledger?
This is not how students are taught bookkeeping.  Going straight to the
general ledger seems like a guarantee that the books will never be balanced
and that the user will never really understand what money is going where and
how and why.

 

Many people that switch to Gnucash have existing data they would like to set
up.  This can involve dozens of accounts and thousands of transactions.
For example I use excel and would like to instead use Gnucash.    I can save
the spreadsheet as a .csv file, but the problem with Gnucash is that I guess
I can only import one account at a time?   Why not let me specify right in
the spreadsheet the name of the account that transaction goes into?

 

If Gnucash used a general journal as the point of entry into the sytem, it
seems like it would be easier for people to import their data.   Is there a
way around the problem of importing one account at a time?

Thank You