How to enter a multiple line deposit

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 3/10/2015 8:09 PM, Roderick Anderson wrote:
>
> I just took over (volunteered, railroaded) as the Treasurer for a 
> small club.  The previous treasurer used Quicken/Quickbooks but I run 
> mostly Windows free so that was not an option I cared for.

Your questions are unrelated to gnucash vs Quickbooks (you'd be having 
EXACTLY the same problems)

> I have GnuCash installed and the accounts mostly set up.  One of the 
> income sources for the club is membership.  I have run into two 
> problems while making my first entries.
>
> 1. The Income->Membership Dues entries are decreasing checking account 
> balance.  I am sure I will figure this out but a clue stick would be 
> appreciated.

Stop immediately and review the basics of double entry bookkeeping and 
practice with a small set of test books until you can do things like 
this correctly.

Membership does being deposited in the bank should be a debit to the 
checking account (asset) and a credit to membership dues (income).

>
> 2. How do I make a multi line 'deposit' transaction?  I would like to 
> see all the dues collect for a period (month) sort of like a deposit 
> slip.  Do I use some type of identifier that would group them together?
>
> Is this making any sense at all?  I could probably do it as a 
> variation on a split.

Yes a split, but this is one of the cases where doing twice the work 
(not really, but two step) would be easier and in any case probably more 
accurately reflect the transactions. Treasurer of a small organization? 
Well I am too, and I know I do not make daily trips to the bank, 
certainly not troubling to try to get each and every check coming in 
deposited before the end of the business day. Do you?

Well that member has NOT paid his or her dues on the day you manage to 
get to the ban for your monthly deposit.  So perfectly reasonable to 
enter each of these payments into "undeposited cash" (asset). Then when 
you do make the bank deposit, that is simply  a transaction to transfer 
between the two asset accounts. So the bank deposit transaction doesn't 
care for what the amounts were (yes, you are depositing a series of 
checks from  members, but THAT part of it recorded when you entered the 
transaction to undeposited cash and endorsed the check "for deposit 
only" to be collected till you had enough of them or a big enough total 
to make a trip to the bank worth while.

BTW, in my case the transactions might STILL be splits, but if these 
checks are just for membership, maybe yours will be simple. And example 
of a split would be when a member includes a donation amount above the 
membership dues (so some of that "membership income" and some "donations 
income".

Michael D Novack