Record income/ expense from side gig

DaveC49 davidcousens at bigpond.com
Mon Aug 22 20:04:43 EDT 2016


Hi Michael,

My point wasn't about the fundamental nature of acccounts but about the
Gnucash implementation in the new account dialogue.  For example if I create
a top level account Named Beta for example, it must be one of the type
listed as a top level account in the Account Types Panel, the list being
Bank
Cash
Asset
Credit Card
Liability
Stock
Mutual Fund
Income
Expense
Equity
A/Receivable
A/Payable
Trading.

If I create account Beta as an Asset account, when I create a sub-account of
Beta the list of available types is limited to
Bank
Cash
Asset
Credit Card
Liability
Stock
Mutual Fund
A/Receivable and
 Accounts Payable

If I create Beta as an account of type Equity the only available option in
the type list is Equity  and so on. These limitations are quite sensible.

I accept your point that you can always override the account type
functionality by your assignment of the debit and credit components of a
transaction, however the developers have created them for a reason and I
suspect it is primarily to do with being able to automatically define
sensible default actions for certain account types, particularly in the
implementation of the business functions and the reporting functions. 

By not choosing the right account type it could compromise the use of some
of this functionality, particularly for new users who are not necessarily
all that familiar with accounting practice and /or the Gnucash functionality
and they may not be aware at least initially that that functionality is not
reporting what they think. Of course, once you have some experience up and a
better understanding any problems can ultimately be fixed up but it does
create extra work and the taxman may not be as understanding about you being
on a learning curve. ( In Australia ours are pretty good as long as you have
tried to do the right thing but they get pretty aggressive if they think you
are trying to diddle them out of their just desserts).

I personally would like to see a top level account of the type Entity which
can have sub accounts of all the other available types as it would simplify
the situation Chris has described, but then one can always maintain a
separate set of books. In dealing with a very small business operation of my
wife's maintaining separate books complicated things because she often had
transfers between her personal funds and the business operations where she
paid for things in advance out of personal funds and then when the business
income came in, reimbursed herself from the business funds. Where her
personal accounts and business accounts were in the same Gnucash book, this
was easily recorded with transactions to and from equity without having to
have multiple copies of Gnucash running in two books.

The really good thing about Gnucash is that it is fairly flexible and you
can generally bend it to meet your individual requirements without too many
artificial contortions. As a former MYOB and Quicken user I can attest that
was not always the case with other software.

Best WIshes

David.




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