New User, some questions before setting up

[Dorel Ciornei]

Hi Joan,I see no one answered, so I will give you my feedback.
First it's a matter of effort vs reward.
Of course ideally would be to have all the transactions entered in your accounting system, so you can see past years performance (income, profit, customers, etc). But entering a few years of transactions could be a lot of work.
Starting this year, would be easier.
Personally I think you could enter the open invoices, so you can clear them and show the income in a consistent manner with future invoices.Just use the real dates when you sent them, and everything should work ok.
Now, there is also a compromise that you could do to enter data from previous years.I don't know if this is a good idea or bad, but I did it before in one occasion and it worked for me nicely:
You could enter subtotals for your previous transactions, one per month, or one per quarter for example.So you would pick one day of the quarter (I'd pick either the last day of the quarter, ex March 31, 2014, or a date in the middle of the quarter as in Feb 14, 2014) and enter your transactions that happened that quarter (Utilities, Taxes, Auto Expenses, Income (for each customer), Materials for each job, etc).
Then you do the second quarter, etc. So you end up with 4 transactions to enter for each account, for the previous year.If you want a more granular record, you can enter one transaction for each month.I guess it's all a matter of how many transactions you have and how much work you are willing to put in it.
But, I would encourage you to wait a bit longer for answers as there are some smarter people than me reading this that can give you better answers.:)
Good luck
Dorel


    On Saturday, January 23, 2016 9:16 AM, Joan <mjplus7 at verizon.net> wrote:
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user
[mailto:gnucash-user-bounces+mjplus7=verizon.net at gnucash.org] On Behalf Of
Joan Bornemann
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2016 9:03 PM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: New User, some questions before setting up

Hi Everyone

 

I am trying to set GNUcash up for a small business that is going into it's
4th year.

 

I was keeping track on excel sheets, but now find the need to move to this
program

I am wondering how to start off the year, do I need to actually start by
entering invoices from last year so that payments coming in for those
invoices will post correctly?  Or just enter the payments received so far
(applicable to last year's invoices)?

 

If so, should I also set up entering the previous years to have everything
on GNUcash?

 

Thanks so much!

 

Joan



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