Wow! I'm impressed and have a question

[Robert Kesterson]

Hi, Ron.

> 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. 

That's a lot of data alright,  but for Quicken to tell you they cant 
handle it just seems ludicrous to me.   That said, be aware that Gnucash 
actually loads the data file entirely into memory when you open it up, 
so it will need plenty of free memory and a good bit of time to start up 
with such a large amount of data.  (I wouldn't expect it to be a 
problem, it just takes a while to load that much data.)

Now as to your question....  I'm not entirely sure I understand what 
you're wanting to accomplish.   So I'll first paraphrase your question 
-- if this is wrong, then my answer will be wrong too.  But maybe 
something in it will still be useful.

You have a loan, and you want to make a payment on that loan from your 
checking account.  You want to categorize that money as an allowance.   
The loan's initial balance is 18,000.  The checking account's initial 
balance is 500.  The loan payment amount is 300.

There are two key things to keep in mind about GnuCash.  The first is 
that it is a double-entry accounting system.  Any transaction always 
involves two accounts (thus, two entries).  Split transactions are 
really just collections of smaller transactions that add up to the 
single larger transaction.

The second thing is that all the "categories" you assign to transaction 
are actually accounts.  A lot of finance software treats categories more 
like "tags" that you assign to a transaction, rather than as accounts in 
their own right.  But in GnuCash, expenses, income, and the like are all 
actual accounts.

I think that's what's throwing me here -- you've got *three* accounts 
involved and you're trying to do it in *one* account register.  I'm not 
sure why you'd want to do it that way, but you certainly can.  
(Personally, I'd move money straight from the checking account to the 
loan account and not have the intermediary Allowance acount.)

So, to get back to your question, to make it happen, here's how I would 
do it.   This may not be the best way or the only way, but it's how I 
would approach it.

1.  Create the initial loan account and checking account.  That will 
create transactions pulling money from "Equity:Opening Balances" into 
the accounts, so that the double entry requirement is satisfied.

2.  Create an asset account called Allowance. This is where you want the 
money to come from when paying the loan.  Set the opening balance to zero.

3.  Create a transaction in the checking account for $300, with the 
destination account being the Assets:Allowance account.

4.  Create a second transaction in the Assets:Allowance account for $300 
with the destination account being the loan account.

Yes, this is a "paper" transaction, you're actually writing a check 
directly to the loan.  But if you want the money to be recorded as 
coming from the allowance account, you have to move it out of checking 
into allowance, and then from allowance into loan.  Note that the 
amounts in all of these transactions will be *positive* numbers.  For 
the transaction from checking to allowance, it will show as a 300 
withdrawal from checking and a 300 deposit into Allowance.  For the loan 
payment it will show a 300 withdrawal from Allowance and a 300 decrease 
to the loan

Your accounts after all of that would show a checking balance of 200, a 
loan balance of 17,700, and an Allowance balance of zero.

Hopefully that makes sense.  At least if I understood your scenario 
correctly.  :)
> 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