[GNC] Fwd: liability or expense

[Stephen M. Butler]

On 08/06/2018 02:14 PM, Graham Balin wrote:
> Forwarded as I forgot to 'reply  all'. Sorry. Newbie brain!
>
> Cheerio
>
> Graham
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Graham Balin <graham.balin at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2018, 10:12 pm
> Subject: Re: [GNC] liability or expense
> To: Baldero Mendoza <bzy711 at gmail.com>
>
>
> I have found Gnucash to be a very powerful hammer to crack a very small nut
> using it for domestic accounts only. Does the job well but there are
> features of double entry bookkeeping that are superfluous. For example you
> will have an expenses;groceries account that will be a mass of entries and
> will never be reconciled because it is irrelevant.just ignore it. It is
> there to help you categorise your spending. Well, you can reconcile it if
> you want to spend half your life on your accounts!
> I'm into my 3rd month and haven't done any reports yet. Just pleased that
> all bank accounts and liabilities (credit cards)are balanced and
> reconciled. Investments are taking a bit longer to get my head around.
> Good luck!
>
> Cheerio
>
> Graham

You typically don't reconcile expense accounts.  You can go through a
year-end process that will "zero" the expense/income accounts and update
equity (or whatever you want) via a year-end offsetting transaction. 
It's nice if you want the equity account updated annually.

> On Mon, 6 Aug 2018, 10:02 pm Baldero Mendoza, <bzy711 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Please be patient with me - brand new to this.
>>
>> Household financial stuff. I want to post a "google play" purchase.
>> Should I post as an expense or a liability?
>>
>> I have accounts open for things like "electricity" and that seems to
>> work just fine, but "google play" looks like it works sort of like a
>> credit card, so I listed it under  "liabilities", and that seems to
>> work too. I made the connected account "checking" and it all seems to
>> balance and work.
>>
>> However, what bothers me is that the "google play" entry under
>> "liabilities" is listed as a red negative number. So I have two red
>> negative numbers listed now, one under "liabilities" and one under
>> "google play". Everything balances, so is it okay or should I place
>> "google play" purchases as "expenses"? (I just started gnucash so
>> there aren't any credit card or debit card purchases yet.) The
>> "expenses" stuff gets listed as black positive numbers even though
>> they're an outflow of money just like the "google play" stuff under
>> "liabilities". Maybe it's optional and can be done either way?
>> Confusing.
>>
>> Thank you everybody!

-- 
Stephen M Butler, PMP, PSM
Stephen.M.Butler51 at gmail.com
kg7je at arrl.net
253-350-0166
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