gnucash-user Digest, Vol 164, Issue 13

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at gmail.com
Sat Nov 12 15:54:04 EST 2016


Owen,

You’ve may have realized this already if you’ve attempted to implement David’s advice, but just to be clear, you noted in your original post that your Asset accounts had not changed from their original balances after entering all of your transactions.  That tells me you were entering expenses directly into their respective accounts without specifying the asset account the money was coming from, which GnuCash then attributed to Imbalance-AUD. Thus, the vast majority of your Imbalance-AUD transactions will already have their correct expenses accounts associated, just no asset account. (I think David was suggesting the opposite)

So when you are going through the Imbalance account, you will likely be looking at something like this:

cr.	Imbalance-AUD	AUD50
dr.	Expense:Food			AUD50


You’ll want to change the account from Imbalance-AUD to say Assets:Current Assets:Checking or so. (If you paid anything with a credit card, that is, a card you will later receive a bill for, not a debit card, then you’ll be ‘paying’ that expense with a corresponding liability account, not an asset account)

cr.	Assets:Current Assets:Checking		AUD50
dr.	Expense:Food							AUD50


If, after all is done with the expenses in the Imbalance-AUD account you still have entries, those are likely either transfers or income that also need to have their accounts updated. Your Imbalance-AUD account doesn’t seem to have an easy to spot balance that clues you in because it likely contains imbalances against both income and expenses which will necessarily offset to some degree. It is showing you the net balance of all such transactions.

As a good rule of thumb in practice, I find it less confusing to always use my payment method as the account from where I enter transactions. That way, I never enter an expense without saying where the money came from. I’m instead saying I spent X amount from a particular asset account on this particular expense. So if I go to the grocery store and paid with a debit card, I open the checking account register and enter this:

cr.		Assets:Current Assets:Checking	$25.00
dr.		Expenses:Groceries				$25.00

Had I used a credit card instead, I would have opened the Liability:VISA account register and entered it there instead like so:

cr.		Liabilities:VISA		$25.00
dr.		Expenses:Groceries		$25.00

When I get the credit card bill and write a check to them I enter this in my checking account register:

cr.		Assets:Current Assets:Checking		$200
dr.		Liabilities:VISA						$200

When I receive money, I say I received X amount into a particular account for some reason. (salary, gift, etc.) So if I get $100 cash for my birthday, I open the cash account register and enter this:

cr.		Cash		$100
dr.		Income:Gifts		$100

Complicated entries like regular paychecks can be set up as recurring transactions, or at least remembered and altered slightly if the amounts vary but the splits do not. The same can be done for regular bills such as utilities.

Best of luck,

Adrien


> On Nov 12, 2016, at 3:30 AM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
> 
> From: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com <mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com>>
> Subject: Re: - Novice Question.
> Date: November 12, 2016 at 3:30:46 AM CST
> To: "John R. Sowden" <jsowden at americansentry.net <mailto:jsowden at americansentry.net>>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> 
> 
> John,
> 
> GnuCash is fundamentally based on double entry accounting. If the user fails to enter the second part of a transaction, GnuCash will finish the transaction, as you say. And, yes, there has been discussion about forcing the software to stop each time a user fails to enter the second part of a transaction, and the general consensus has been that the current solution is preferable to a user setting or a repeated nag screen. I’m not exactly sure how GnuCash could ever possibly adopt an Intuit (I chuckled at your typo, BTW) style of interface; Intuit does not enforce double entry accounting, which is the primary definition of what GnuCash is. So, yes, if you don’t want double entry accounting, you *will* need to find another accounting program. However, if you can wrap your head around double entry, then GnuCash performs admirably.
> 
> Moreover, the Imbalance account itself is an audit trail—and an easy one to troubleshoot, since you can open that account up and see what precisely has ended up there. 
> 
> For the OP, the solution I would recommend would be to open up the Imbalance-AUD account, and systematically edit each transaction in that account, changing the Imbalance-AUD split to its appropriate expense account (e.g., Expenses:Auto). Once that register is empty, you will have corrected all the mis-entered transactions.
> 
> David T.



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