How difficult is it (really) to reorganize a Chart-of-Accounts after the fact?

[Wm]

Fri, 2 Jan 2015 21:12:47 
<CAF_dkJCgyvg3s1RKb=KKVE02LOOjtw2vedtSZPRHEq4tiXh-sA at mail.gmail.com> 
Patrick Doyle <wpdster at gmail.com>

>Thank you for your patience and your gentle instructions.  I'm sorry
>to be so dense about this.

I think it is transitional if you're moving from one system to another.

>My checking account is an asset.  (That I knew).

Yup and your buckets are assets (or divisions of an asset) too, have a 
look at what Buddha Buck said, I thought he explained it quite well.

>An asset account is a debit account.  (Still blows my mind, and
>perhaps that's what leads to my missing the point, over and over
>again).

You can worry about that later.

>Double entry accounting requires that the sum of the debits in a
>transaction must match the sum of credits in that transaction.  (That
>has always made perfect sense to me.)

Yup

>If I buy groceries with a check, I want to "credit" my Assets:Checking account
>That will make the balance go down.  (Ouch -- how long will it take
>for that to sink in?  A "credit" will make my checking account go
>down!?!? -- That is what has lead to my fundamental disconnect, over
>and over again.)

Edit / Preferences / Accounts is your friend here, you can play with

   Reverse Balanced Accounts

and

   Labels

to achieve most accounting views

I think what is going on is that you don't have trust in gnc and until 
you do you're going to be looking at the small picture of dr and cr 
which we know gnc does right.  So to more familiar users your delving 
into this is a function of another system having been crappy rather than 
gnc being bad.

>Since I want to track that expense, I must debit my Expenses:Food account

Correct

>That will make the balance go up.
>-- And here is where my view of the universe differs from everybody else's.
>
>I want the balance in my *:Food account to go _down_ when I debit it.

It all works out if you record the original amount set aside for food as 
an asset rather than equity.

>Fundamentally, I think of that *:Food account as a bucket that
>contains money.

An Asset

>  When I spend Food related money, I want the balance
>to go down.

It does if it is an Asset

>The only way I see to do this is to use a "credit" account to hold
>that bucket.  My choices for "credit" accounts (not be be confused
>with "credit card accounts") are Equity, Income, and Liability
>accounts.  The only one that makes sense here, given my view of the
>universe, is for my Food bucket to be an Equity account.

No, the food account is a subdivide of the asset checking account

Let me put it this way, if you didn't buy food for a month would the 
money you allocated to food still be in your bank account ?  The answer 
is yes, it is am asset, you need to acknowledge this.

It only becomes equity when you spend it, just because you put it in 
equity before you spend the money on food doesn't make it equity.  For 
convenience we use Income and Expense accounts as explained by Mike.

>That way, when I _debit_ my Equity:Food account, (to match the
>corresponding _credit_ in my checking account) it's balance will go
>down.
>
>Whew!
>Why am I doing this?  Because I want things to match what I have always done.

Yup, you learned one thing and there is no way you are going to adjust

>I went through a similar experience when I first started using Quicken
>-- I couldn't figure out how to make a Food "Expense" account and
>track a balance with it that when up when I put money in ( and down
>when I took money out.  Actually, I don't think I could even figure
>out how to "put money into an "Expense" account way back then.
>
>Way back then, I didn't have a community I could ask.  So I made up my
>own system where I used classes to track balances, and gave up on
>using categories.
>
>Why do I want to match what I have always done?
>Do I _have_ to match what I have always done?
>Nope.  But if it works for me, why change?  What benefit would I get
>by switching to a different approach?  Yes, its the way all the cool
>kids do it, but I've never been a cool kid, so that doesn't work for
>me.

Use assets rather than equity for your buckets.

Income goes into assets.

Expenses take stuff out of assets.

Not hard, really

>What has happened over the past couple of days, through this thread
>and my "Old Dog, New Tricks" thread, is that it has forced me to ask
>myself the question, "What do I _really_ want my financial management
>software to do for me?"  I don't know the answer to that yet.

Some people have very specific requirements, I'm pretty sure yours can 
be accommodated even if, in accounting terms, they're reversionary :)

>What I want to do (and will do momentarily in a new thread) is to ask
>the community how they (you) use GNUCash to manage your personal
>finances.

Loads of us are doing that

>Perhaps as I read about real world experiences, instead of theoretical
>experiences in the manual, the light will finally dawn on my marble
>head.

I'm still soft tissue here in the real world

hny

-- 
Wm...