Scout Troop Dues Structure

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 4/3/2016 9:29 PM, Jason Dunham wrote:
> What a coincidence, I have just become a scout troop treasurer in the last
> month, and I am converting our books from Excel (gasp!) to Gnucash. ..........
>
> So there is $25 in the bank, right? I am surprised that the liability
> balance is ($1), whereas I would expect it to be positive. If the troop
> owes a family $1 then that is a positive liability balance in the liability
> account associated with that family.
>
> Jason
Well first of all, if not using a software package like gnucash, and if 
experienced in old fashioned pen and ink on paper bookkeeping, not that 
crazy to use spreadsheets. Where of course you can have the columns just 
like they would have been on accounting paper. While you could still 
make mistakes while posting from journal to ledger, at least you 
wouldn't be making any mistakes in arithmetic and the spreadsheet could 
be set to check against "entered out of balance".

Now to your confusion. The "user friendly" column titles aren't always 
friends to those unfamiliar with double entry bookkeeping. Sometimes the 
old fashioned "debit" and "credit" can be more self explanatory, 
especially in a case like this where confused about "positive" or 
"negative".

In old fashioned bookkeeping, no negative amounts and the only operation 
addition. What there was instead were debits and credits, the two sides 
of the ledger, and we can even speak of an account as a "debit account" 
(one whose balance is USUALLY debit) or a "credit account" (one whose 
balance is usually credit).

Liabilities are on the credit side of the ledger. Increasing a liability 
means making it more credit. An asset account is on the debit side of 
the ledger. Increasing it makes it more debit.

They are of opposite sense (like plus vs minus) but you shouldn't think 
of either of them as being intrinsically plus or minus, just opposite.  
What gets displayed as a negative (red) means balance amount on the 
opposite side from what expected for that type of account. A credit 
balance in an a account of type Asset or a debit balance in an account 
of type Liability would both be in red.

Michael D Novack