how to automatically update equity account as each transaction is entered?

[Michael Wagner]

> Michael, thank you for your reply.
> 
> Now I guess I just have to find the time and energy to learn double-entry
> accounting, and to do so in a dialect that GnuCash would allow.
> 
> BTW, for me the GnuCash documentation just doesn't seem to get the job
> done.  Nice try, but . . .
> 
I learned that stuff because I wanted to, not because I needed it to use gnucash. At least for me, the concepts got a lot clearer as I used gnucash. The columns in the serious accounts are named the way I'd expect (i.e., something like "deposit" and "withdrawal" for a checking account) - you don't necessarily know which is a debit and which is a credit. For example, it happens that the "deposit" column got a checking account is on the left, and the "withdrawals" are the right - that makes "deposits" debits and "withdrawals" credits, but I didn't need to know that.

When/if gnucash did something that surprised me, I assumed that gnucash developers understood accounting better than I did. So I'd draw little boxes and try to understand what was going on. 

Within a couple of months, I seemed to understand everything that I needed to understand about double entry bookkeeping for my limited purposes.

I found the combination of reading a little and using gnucash a lot brought me up to speed pretty painlessly.

Mike