Can Gnucash Be Used As Single Entry?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 1/24/2016 5:01 PM, DaveC49 wrote:
> Hi JL Marcos,
>
> You can think of double entry accounting as a generalisation of your
> spreadsheet system. In your single spreadsheet which is presumably for your
> bank account and/or credit card you are specifying the source account which
> in your spreadsheet is fixed at one of the above. You are also specifying
> the destination account ( the category of expenditure). In your spreadsheet
> if you want to know how much you spent on a particular category of
> expenditure, you would have to find all entries with that category as the
> destination and sum up the totals.
>
> Accountants are basically lazy and this is too much trouble if a business or
> entity has a large number of transactions so they derived a procedure in
> which an "account" is maintained for each source of funds for expenditure
> and an "account" is maintained for each category of expenditure.
As usual I will try to explain in terms of the history of bookkeeping.

Back in the days of pen and ink on paper, when transactions were first 
entered into a journal and then posted to the ledger, it was noticed 
that a very large percentage of transactions involved the cash account 
and some relatively small subset of expense accounts (or income 
accounts). So "cashbook bookkeeping" was invented. In that form, instead 
of the journal, a "cashbook". That would have columns for debit and 
credit to cash, a pair of columns debit and credit for transactions NOT 
involving the subset (and in one variant, not involving cash either, and 
then column pairs for the popular subset. The "general journal" could 
also be kept separately.

When entering a transaction involving cash and one of the subset 
accounts the "post" box was immediately marked (as these would not be 
posted individually). Other transactions were like normal journal 
entries, to be posted later. At the bottom of the page, an (big) 
transaction to close each column to the ledger so below that the total 
for every account (cash and the subsets) would be zero, an on to the 
next page. This was a shortcut to eliminate the work of posting perhaps 
90% of the transactions individually. I still have a supply of 12 (4, 
then 8 on facing side) column paper in some drawer. But if doing this 
today, I would simply set up a spreadsheet with columns like that. 
Another variant would have an "in" and "out" cash separately (here the 
general journal almost certainly separately).

Because gnucash is autoposting, the saving of effort goes away. But it 
something like THIS that somebody is likely doing when they say they are 
using spreadsheets and "single entry". Nope, still a form of double entry.

Michael