GnuCash Income - How to manage?

[Aaron Laws]

Please always direct your replies to the list for a more general
edification as well as enriching the mailing list archives for posterity,
etc.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Samuel Holmes <samuel.holmes6 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sorry Aaron, I don't quite get it. Are you saying my Income account should
> be a "Revenue" account? Also, the money that you credit into your Salary
> account, which debit is associated with that? My point is, unless the
> salary paid in each month or week or whatever is ignored within Gnucash it
> seems to me there will always be an Imbalance, because there has to be a
> transaction showing the income COMING from somewhere.
>
> Am I understanding correctly?
>
>> For example, I am paid monthly, and the transaction looks like this
>> (account types in parentheses):
>>
>> DR Federal Income Taxes (expense)
>> DR Local Income Taxes (expense)
>> DR Insurance (expense)
>> DR HSA (asset -- bank account used for medical expenses)
>> DR Checking (asset)
>> DR Parking Permit (expense)
>> CR salary (revenue)
>>
>
For our purposes today, revenue and income are interchangeable. Revenue is
a preferable term here since it denotes gross money whereas income denotes
net money or profit.

 "which debit is associated with that" - all of them. Sum(debits) -
Sum(credits) = 0 (or, equivalently, Sum(debits) = Sum(credits)). So, to put
the transaction into plain english, I get Z dollars as revenue from my job
as salary. Of that, Y dollars are spent on a parking permit, X dollars go
into Checking, W dollars go to my HSA, V dollars pay for insurance, etc.
Y+X+W+V+U+T=Z (that is, the sum of the debits equals the sum of the
credits).

Again, feel free to ask for clarification!

Aaron