what should I use as a starting balance?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 5/12/2016 9:47 PM, DaveC49 wrote:
> Greg,
>
> What you use as a starting balance depends to some extent why you are using
> Gnucash and for what purpose.
>
> If it is simply for recording personal finances..........

And HOW you do it might depend on your experience with double entry 
bookkeeping. I will explain the "more general" approach because some 
people might want to do it that way (and it will make how to add 
historical data LATER more obvious).

First of all, there is no magic to the "starting entry". The developers 
have provided this "quick start" letting you put in initial values for 
the accounts at the beginning and this probably makes things easier for 
beginners but you DON'T have to do it that way. You could, instead have 
defined your CoA with all accounts at zero. Define your books without 
any transactions.

Then you would enter the initial values for each account of type asset 
or liability (the opposite side of these transactions would be equity 
where you would have created a suitably named account like "starting 
equity". The date you use is the start date of your books, and yes, you 
could do this with split transactions so just two (if split on just one 
side) or even just one (but two way splits are not for beginners).

OK -- why am I saying this when there is the quick start? Well remember 
that thing about maybe wanting to go back and enter historical data? 
There is simply no magic to the fact that you (now) have a start date 
(earliest transactions). You maybe can't use the "quick start" to change 
that but you could simply enter the earlier data the way I just described.

Michael