Wow! I'm impressed and have a question

[Ron Nicol]

I can't thank the gnucash developers and this community enough for what
you've created.

 

You might find a little background amusing.  I have been using Quicken for
decades and even went back and entered all of my transactions from 1971.  My
Quicken data file is 250 MB.  Over the last few years, when a new version
has been released, I've had to reverse engineer things such as security
price data history etc.  This year the program locks up about once a day
with no error messages.  In my discussions with the Quicken support team I
received little information of value. They scheduled a call for me with a
higher level of support which required a week to schedule.  In the meantime,
I ascertained that the database was corrupted in April of last year.  I
completely restored the data by the time they called.  I expressed my
frustration and was told that my problem was that my data file was too big
and that the only suggestion they had was for me to delete all of my history
except for the last five years.  Needless to say this was not acceptable.

 

I have begun the journey to gnucash and love the proper accounting handling
of the data.  The qif import module is extremely well written and I've been
amazed at how well it's importing over 40 years of data.  Because of
Quicken's lack of a robust accounting model I've had to change any
self-referential transactions where money is transferred into the same
account.  Quicken has used this form of transaction for Opening Balances.

 

Also, for those of you considering moving from Quicken to gnucash, I was
surprised that the option to export all of the the accounts into a qif also
included all of the investment accounts which Quicken supposedly doesn't
support.

 

The problem I've run into can be replicated as follows:

 

1.       Create a loan in Quicken where the Loan Owed To Me  with an opening
balance of $18,000.  Quicken properly creates an asset account called Loan
Owned To Me.  

2.       Create an account called Checking with a $500 opening balance which
represents the checking account.

3.       Enter a  $0  Test Transaction split transaction in the Checking
Account register with the following splits:

Category                              Amount

Allowance                           $300

[Loan Owed To Me]        - $300

 

My expectation was that the expense account Allowance would have increased
by $300 and the [Loan Owed to Me] account would have been reduced by $300
and had a balance of $17,700 and the Checking account balance would be
reduced by $300 to $200  Instead gnucash recorded the following transactions
(in transaction journal view):

 

Account: Checking

                Date                                      Description
Tot Deposit                         Tot Withdrawal
Balance

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Opening Balance
500.00
500.00

Checking                                              500.00


Equity:Retained Earnings
500.00

 

 

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Test Transaction
500.00


 
Loan Owed To Me                           300.00

 
Checking

Allowance
300.00

 

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Test Transaction
300.00
800.00

Checking                                              300.00


Loan Owed To Me
300.00

 


 

Account: Loan Owed To Me

 

Date                                      Description
Tot Increase                       Tot Decrease
Balance

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Opening Balance
18,000.00
18,000.00

 
Loan Owed To Me                           18,000.00

 
Equity:Retained Earnings
18,000.00

 

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Test Transaction
300.00
18,300.00

 
Loan Owed To Me                           300.00

 
Checking

 
Allowance
300.00                                   

 

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Test Transaction
300.00                                   18,000.00

 
Checking                              300.00

 
Loan Owed To Me
300.00

 

Account:  Allowance

Date                                      Description
Tot Charge                          Tot Income                 Balance

                xx/xx/xxxx                         Test Transaction
300.00                                   300.00

 
Loan Owed To Me                           300.00

 
Checking                                                              

 
Allowance
300.00

 

I have reversed the sign of the splits in the Test Transaction in Quicken
and the Loan Owed To Me balance goes to $17,700 after the first entry and
then back to $18,000 on the second.  I did the above without first setting
up a simple chart of accounts.  I then went back and did it with a simple
chart of accounts and was able to have Allowance recognized as an expense
when I assigned Allowance as an expense account but the balance of the loan
still didn't change.  I apologize in advance if I've done something
completely silly here.