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

[Francis Gerund]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 11:30 AM, Michael Wagner <mikepwagner at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> > 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




Geert,
Sorry, but I could not even begin to "suggest improvements to the
documentation", or "help write some missing parts".  One has to learn
something first, before trying to teach it to others.

Michael,
I am thinking maybe I should just forget GnuCash for now, and just try to
re-learn what accounting I did know years ago, the way I learned it then:
by using paper ledger pads - the kind you can still get at office supply
stores.  Agonizingly tedious, but at least the ledger pads won't argue with
the accounting books (with me in the middle)!