Wow! I'm impressed and have a question

[Ron Nicol]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my earlier message. I appreciate the feedback on how this transaction should be entered.  All of the advice is very good and would be exactly how I would enter the transaction manually. Unfortunately, I have numerous types of these transactions over the decades so I'm trying to determine how the QIF importer is handling these transactions to identify whether I'm doing something wrong and whether it's being properly handled by the software. 

Maybe a little more context will be helpful. The specific situation that arose leading to this type of transaction was when my daughter asked for a loan to buy a car. The transaction I entered into my Quicken check register was a $300 split entry to recognize her allowance and an opposite split to transfer that $300 to reduce the amount of the loan she owed me. This works in Quicken by leaving the checking account balance the same, decreasing the loan by $300, and increasing the Allowance Expense category by $300. 

After importing the qif file, gnucash does not show the correct balances. For example, the loan asset is not reduced in value. Unfortunately, as we all know Quicken is not a proper double entry system but I would think the importer should be able to properly import this transaction.  

Ron

> On Jan 9, 2015, at 8:20 AM, Dustin Henning <The00Dustin at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 1/9/2015 7:30 AM, Robert Kesterson wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> For the record, you can actually do the same thing with a split.  The split just needs to have for legs, with $300 on both sides of the two legs to the same Assets:Allowance account. This will look the same in the ledgers, but I don't know about reports.  Also, it might not be preferred since one could potentially argue that Assets:Allowance started with $0, then transferred $300 to itself, leaving it with $0 while the $300 from checking still went straight to the loan account. Regardless of whether any of that matters, I mention this simply because it would make input easier if those potential negative side-effects (report problems and stupid arguments) don't apply.
> 
> Additionally, while I don't know if this would be correct based on standard accounting conventions, another option here might be to make two sub accounts under Assets:Allowance.  For instance Assets:Allowance:In and Assets:Allowance:Out.  Then you could take $300 from checking to Assets:Allowance:In and $300 from Assets:Allowance:Out to the loan.  These subaccounts would have balances that cancel each other out, making Assets:Allowance still show $0, and you could then report off of the relevant subaccount in order to see the dollar value of only transfers you want to see.  In this scenario, my previous discussion about splits would probably still apply in the same way.
>