tracking bank service charges

[Michael Hendry]

> On 2 Jul 2015, at 21:52, gg <gg at mailinator.com> wrote:
> 
> In real life it's called [my bank name] Settlement Account.
> I think you're trying to tell me that I should've created the same account
> in the gnucash tree.

Yes, that’s what you should do.

You can either create a new account for your bank, or simply rename one of the accounts GnuCash has created for you.

In my case, I have a current account (in US = checking account) with the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is at "/Assets/Current Assets/RBS - Royalties Gold" in the account tree.

{As I type this reply, I remember that RBS have recently changed the name of this account - I’ll probably edit its name in due course…).

I record all transactions that relate to this account through it - those I know about, that is - and reconcile my version of events with the bank’s view every month when I receive a bank statement. Any mismatch between my version and the bank statement needs to be investigated; keying errors, forgotten transactions and those I didn’t know about (e.g. BACS pay-ins) are the most common discrepancies, but I have occasionally picked up a bank error or fraudulent transaction.

For recurring payments such as insurance premiums, utility bills, pension income etc., I use the Scheduled Transactions (“SX") feature, and cheques and other irregular expenditure I record directly.

As well as accounts for the usual expenditure (as above) I also have an account called “/Expenses/Royal Bank Charges” which is where I record monthly charges (using SX) and one-off charges (entered “by hand”).

Pardon me for suggesting it, but I suspect you may not have a grounding in Double-Entry Bookkeeping, which is the basis on which GnuCash is built.

Michael

> I didn't do this and resorted to standard accounts
> which gnucash offers via its' accounts creation wizard because there are
> really a lot of account types in the gnucash, and each type can do some
> things and cannot do another ones. So I just created what gnucash offers as
> a default configuration - at least there are some tutorials which are based
> on this accounts set.