Liabilities debits and credits swapped in General Ledger

Tommy Trussell tommy.trussell at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 03:28:26 EST 2016


On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 1:48 AM, James Thorpe <James at fusionsystems.co.za>
wrote:

> Hi All
>
> Sorry to re-post but I didn't see this get into the digest.
>

I saw three posts to the list from James Thorpe -- January 4, January 8,
and January 25.


> 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
>
> Has anyone else had this problem?
> <https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user>


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.

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.

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.

The accountant can advise whether James Thorpe's transactions are recorded
in the business's books in a way the authorities expect.

If you need further assistance (or if this solved your issue), please copy
the list on your reply. If you need more help please give a brief example
describing what entity's GnuCash file you're looking at and what you
intended in a small number of "correct" and "reversed" transactions.

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