Gnucash usage for small banks and GL derivation rules

[Andrey Shalaurov]

John - so would you think that PostBooks would be a better enterprise-level
accounting system?xTuple PostBooks <http://www.xtuple.com/postbooks>

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 12:19 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:

>
>
> > 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
>
>