Gnucash usage for small banks and GL derivation rules

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 20, 2017, at 6:09 AM, Andrey Shalaurov <shalaurov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have two questions:
> 1. Can this software be used for a small business that is a bank /
> financial institution - all accounts have to be flipped from bank's point
> of view e.g. Loans are Assets, Deposits are Liabilities (can the software
> be re-configured as such)?
> 
> 2. It looks like each transaction can be assigned to an 'account' (assuming
> General Ledger/GL Account), are there any other GL derivation rules
> possible e.g. transaction is assigned to a GL account only if a rule set is
> met? Also, can you please clarify within transaction import whether:
> -deposits/withdrawals translates to "debit / credit" (I expected to see the
> D/C indicator for each transaction) and
> -balance translates to each transaction "amount"
> -how do you assign an GL Account "pair" to each transaction (2 accounts),
> seems like in import interface only 1 assignment is possible

GnuCash is not suitable for any business where outside audits and financial controls are a requirement, and banks and financial institutions of whatever size have those requirements. GnuCash also lacks features needed for any business having more than a very few employees.

Those points aside, GnuCash’s chart of accounts can be set up and transactions created any way you like: It exactly mirrors a blank set of ledger books that magically does calculations and makes sure that everything balances. 

To see “Debit” and “Credit” column headings, check “Use formal accounting labels” in the Preferences Accounts tab.

GnuCash’s “General Ledger” isn’t separate from the account ledgers: It’s a view of all of the account ledgers at once. There’s no “General Ledger Account” unless you make one and your use of it would have to be entirely manual.

“Balance” has two meanings in GnuCash: One of them is the current net amount of an account from adding up all of the debits and subtracting all of the credits (for Asset accounts, and the reverse for Liability and Equity accounts). The other is that every transaction must “balance”, meaning that the sum of debits less the sum of credits in the transaction commodity must net to zero.

Transaction import is mostly oriented towards importing transactions for a single asset or liability account as that’s how most of the import protocols (e.g. QIF, OFX, HBCI) are designed: An import stream has a primary account number that the user matches to a GnuCash account the first time it’s encountered, and then each transaction in the stream is matched to its counter-account (usually income or expense). The new CSV import mechanism that will appear in GnuCash 2.8 will be more flexible by allowing multiple splits to arbitrary accounts in each transaction.

Regards,
John Ralls