Confusion over Salary and Savings account usage

[prl]

The way I'd do that is as a single split transaction:
Income:Salary - debit $1000
Assets:Checking - credit $500
Assets:Saving - credit $500

This encapsulates the fact that a single amount of $1000 comes in as 
income and is distributed to your cheque and savings accounts.

The "double entry" refers to the fact that each transaction has equal 
total credit and debit amounts.

You shouldn't have any balance in the Imbalance account. The Imbalance 
account only gets credits or debits in it if a transaction has doesn't 
have equal credit and debit sides.

Have you read the GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide 
(http://gnucash.org/viewdoc.phtml?doc=guide)? Section 2 is about the 
basics, 2.1 is about the main accounting concepts, and 2.1.3 is about 
Double Entry accounting.

Peter

On 4/07/13 11:20, maveri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First up, some info to set the context
>
> Experience: New user
> Version: 2.4.13
> Platform: Windows XP
> DB Type: XML
> Accounting experience: Almost non existent
>
> I'm rather confused over how I enter Income (as salary) and then distribute
> it between various accounts (Savings, checking etc)
>
> I suspect my real issue is my lack of accounting knowledge
>
> Here's what I AM doing, so please point out what I'm doing wrong, as
> obviously what I'm doing is not correct
>
> 1. Entered $1000 as Income.salary
> 2. Entered $ 500 in Assets.Checking account, as transfer from Income.salary,
> entered as deposit
> 3. Entered $ 500 in Assets.Saving account, as transfer from Income.salary,
> entered as deposit
>
> However, I now have:
>
> Total assets $2000 which clearly isn't correct as I only have a total of
> $1000 in salary
>
> So what am I doing wrong?
>
> Also, what is it I am misunderstanding?
>
> I thought the process went something as follows
>
> Money comes in as Salary, is then distributed to various accounts (checking,
> savings etc) - is this not correct?
>
> Also, since this is double entry, when money comes in as Salary, where is
> the other side of the entry recorded? (i.e. It's showing as an Imbalance)
>
> What I thought I would have ended up with is
>
> $1000 recorded as Salary
> from which $500 is then transferred to Checking account and another $500 is
> transferred to savings account, total assets showing $1000 (being the sum of
> $500 checking account + Savings account)
>
> I'm just not understanding the accounting principals involve...
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Confusion-over-Salary-and-Savings-account-usage-tp4662903.html
> Sent from the GnuCash - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>