Liabilities debits and credits swapped in General Ledger

[James Thorpe]

On 27/01/2016 10:28, Tommy Trussell wrote:
>
>     So I've been trying to export my transactions to send to my
>     accountant to prepare financial statements. I've used the General
>     Ledger report (Assets and Liabilities-> General Ledger report) of
>     GnuCash 2.6.10 on Windows.
>
>     I then save the output to html and open in Excel. Mostly this
>     works. However, with a particular account (of type Liability), it
>     seems the debits and credits are swapped in the report.
>
>     The following link is to a folder with screenshots showing the
>     account register and the report. You will observe that the figures
>     that are in the credit column in the account register show up in
>     the debit column of the report and vice versa.
>     https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B62keGjTUPd7eGtYM204QW1WOFk&usp=sharing
>
>
>
>
> You may (not) be aware that you can change the way the columns appear 
> in the registers:
>
>    Edit --> Preferences --> Accounts --> Reversed Balanced Accounts
>
> and in the General Ledger Report:
>
>    Edit --> Report Options [or click the "gear" icon] --> Display --> 
> [scroll to bottom] Sign Reverses
>
> For either the registers or the report, you can choose to reverse 
> "Income and Expense," "Credit Accounts," or "None."
>
> You may be seeing the columns swapped because you have the settings 
> different in the registers and the report. If you change them to 
> match, does it show what you expect? On the other hand, as long as the 
> totals accumulate correctly, it may not be important whether the 
> individual amounts appear in the debit or credit columns in the report.
>
Thanks very much, Tommy - I was not aware of the setting on the report 
options in the General Ledger report which, I think, allows me to 
achieve what I was after.

What I was after was that the sum of all debits is equal to the sum of 
all credits for a given time period. Setting the Sign Reverses on the 
General Ledger report to "None." put the debits in the debits column as 
per the corresponding register and when I export all my accounts to a 
spreadsheet then all the debits and credits from the various accounts 
total to zero which gives me comfort!

I'm a little confused as to why it does this but that may be a result of 
my lack of accounting knowledge and the confusing concept of debits and 
credits to a non-accountant. The other setting 
(Edit->preferences->Accounts->Reverse balanced accounts = Credit 
accounts) doesn't swap the debits and credits in the register but rather 
seems to affect whether the balance is increased or decreased by a 
credit (or debit)... which makes sense as per the wording.

So it seems that in the registers a credit will always be a credit 
regardless of the settings but in the GL report it is possible to swap 
debits and credits using the above setting.


> If you haven't read the documentation, you might find it helpful to 
> read through the examples in the Gnucash Tutorial and Concepts Guide 
> available at http://www.gnucash.org/docs.phtml -- notice how Asset 
> transactions and Liability transactions appear "reversed" to each 
> other because they are positive and negative to each another.
>
I have read the documentation before when I started out but probably 
well worth a re-read now that I've been running for a while with Gnucash.

> You might also find a different kind of report might show what you 
> expect. I find when I am dealing with my accountant, MOST of the time 
> I produce an income statement and a few different kinds of transaction 
> reports to relay the information she needs. Maybe a cash flow report 
> could be helpful to you, though it works a different way.
>
> BY THE WAY... It took me a little while to understand what you're 
> showing on your screenshots. It would have been helpful to me if you 
> had explained! (Though I admit I'm a bit dense.) I finally realized 
> you must be depicting a company's books showing a liability account of 
> money due to James Thorpe.
>
> James Thorpe, I presume, keeps a COMPLETELY separate book (gnucash 
> file or whatever) of his own transactions, where the phone bill got 
> paid from his bank account, the PVC Conduit was purchased with cash or 
> on his credit card, etc. Also his own books will contain things like 
> groceries, veterinarian, and the other NON-business expenses and 
> incomes that don't show up in the company books.
>

Exactly right. Apologies for not being clearer on the meaning of the 
screenshots. I was trying not to confuse everyone with my weird way of 
accounting so I just wanted to point out that a particular transaction 
was in one column in a register and in the opposite column in a 
corresponding report. However that's exactly how I'm doing it - one set 
of books (guncash file) for the company and one for personal. Then any 
time I make a purchase with my own resources (credit card, bank account 
etc) on behalf of the company I record it as a liability in the 
company's books (debit expense account, credit liability account to 
James Thorpe) - the company owes me for this until I am reimbursed.

> The accountant can advise whether James Thorpe's transactions are 
> recorded in the business's books in a way the authorities expect.
>
Exactly what I'm trying to achieve by exporting the transactions for the 
accountant's edification.

Thanks again for your assistance and taking your time to go through this 
confusing set of transactions.

kind regards

-- 
James Thorpe
061 476 2775
James at fusionsystems.co.za