Newbie - retired and receiving pension

[Richard Dawson]

If you are starting with the one of GnuCash's suggested account
structures, such as Common Accounts, then your accounts are categorized
as Income, Expense, Assets, and Liability.  Within each of these
categories Income you have sub-accounts (or sub categories, if you
prefer) for Salary, Bonus, Gifts Received, Interest Income, and Other
Income.  Each of those sub-accounts can contain either transactions or
sub-sub-accounts. 

First, understand that an "account" such as Income, can be either a
straight forward account into which you place transactions, or it can be
more like a "folder" into which you group sub-accounts.

Keeping this in mind, here is how I set up my accounts.  When I was
working, I created a couple of subaccounts in Salary, one subaccount for
each employer.  When I began collecting social security I created a
subaccount within Income for Social Security, and enter social security
payments there.  When I finally retired completely, and began to collect
a pension, I created another subaccount in Income for Pension.  Were I
to draw a pension from more than one company, I would create a
subaccount within pension for each pension source.  My accounts look
something like this:

Income                         --  contains only subaccounts
          Salary                 --  contains only subaccounts
                  Company 1 --  contains transactions
                  Company 2 --  contains transactions
          Social Security    --  contains transactions
          Pension               --  contains transactions

There isn't really any hard rule about how to organize, other than these
should all be income accounts, so within Income and its subaccounts. I
could have had just had one income account containing all of the salary,
social security, and pension payment transactions, but separating the
accounts makes it easier to sum up and analyze income from each source.

As to "They would be splits (fed tax, etc. taken out). - Elmar)," to be
complete you will need to "take out" the deductions from your check. 
For instance, from your pension you may have federal tax with held. 
Suppose your monthly distribution is $1000, but $100 is witheld.  You
would have the difference, $900 deposited in say your checking account. 
Your monthly transaction would be a split, crediting $1000 to your
Income-Pension account and debiting $900 to your Assets-checking account
and $100 to an account for collecting tax payments, say expenses-income tax.

(You could probably make this more complicated, but more accurate, by
creating an asset account for with holding tax, and later move the money
from there to expenses-income tax when you file your tax returns, but
that is more effort than I am willing to expend.)

Credit and debit are frustrating for the non-accountant.  In this case,
money is coming out of the Income-Pension account (which will actually
have its balance increase as you take money out  -- relax, this is what
it should do!), and going in to the other two accounts.  The expense and
asset balances will increase as money flows into them.  This all makes
sense.  At any point in the future, for instance, your income-pension
account will show the total of how much you have received from your
pension, including with held for income tax, an amount that increases
with each month that you receive a check.  Similarly, the expense-tax
account will show the total witheld, and assets-checking will show the
total of what has been paid into it less any expenditures or cash
withdrawals.

This is a lot of words, but it really isn't so terribly difficult once
you get the hang of it. In the register it might look something like
this, looking at it from the assets-checking account register. 
(Assuming a balance of zero prior to the entry.)

Date          Description                Account                        
Deposit     Withdrawal                   Balance 
1/1/2016    Pension
Deposit                                                                                                           
0
                                                  Asset-checking
              900                                                       
                                                  Expense-tax          
        100
                                                  Income-Pension        
                     1000

I hope this helps.

Richard