Newbie needs help with categorizing

[Michael Hendry]

> On 8 Jan 2015, at 10:41, davidj <david at swallowmead.com> wrote:
> 
> I appreciate that Gnucash uses double entry book keeping and as such
> categories are identified as accounts.
> 1. I am solely trying to track expenditure on my personal account and credit
> card. I therefore need to bulk create new categories, how is this done.
> 2. I have imported a years worth of account data to make future comparisons
> how can I quickly/Bulk  categorise these entrentries.
> Any advice much appreciated.

I’ve been using GnuCash for my personal accounts since 2010, and I started with a year of parallel running with the software I’d become used to at work - TAS Books.

Although this was extra work (substantially less than double), it proved invaluable in familiarising me with the new software while having the security blanket of the old.

Diving into new software with a year’s worth of imported data from the old might not be the ideal way of getting into GnuCash, and if you don’t want to do a year of parallel running, you might consider experimenting with a month of data first.

I’ve never used the import features - no doubt others will be able to help you with this - but I would imagine that categorised transactions from your existing program can be mapped to accounts in GnuCash, and that once you have a Chart of Accounts with your various expenditures broken down in the same way as they were categorised in the old software it should be straightforward.

Good luck!

Michael