Recording transactions

[sszd]

I’ve become very confused and am hoping someone can provide some basic help. 
I’m attempting to transition from Quicken to GnuCash.  I will be starting
from a set of accounts that I already have in Quicken, but I have no
intention of importing data from Quicken.  I’ll be obtaining balance
information from my latest statements and starting anew.  I know very little
about double entry bookkeeping, but I’ve been going through the GnuCash
documentation and I’ve already read about 90% of the tutorial and have gone
through the examples.  I’ve already begun setting up accounts for my own
GnuCash file but haven’t actually entered any data yet other than some
experimenting.  Now, let me provide a little background.  I’m going to be
tracking household expenses as well as a “very” small business that my wife
has on the side.  I do not want separate files for these two sets of
bookkeeping as sometimes monies are transferred between personal accounts
and business accounts, and I want to simplify things as much as possible. 
But I do require the ability to track our business expenses/income
separately for tax purposes.  I believe I’ve got a good handle on this with
the accounts I’ve begun to set up that I’m mimicking from my Quicken
accounts/categories.  My wife’s business is simply a shop she has on an
internet site known as Etsy.  I don’t want to deal with accounts receivable
or accounts payable.  We do not issue invoices or anything like that.  Etsy
takes care of all that.  With Quicken we had accounts and categories set up
to deal with basic sales, shipping, sales taxes, refunds, expenses, and a
few other minor things.  I’ve set up accounts for all those things we’d like
to track in GnuCash.  With all the reading and research I’ve done I thought
I was beginning to get a basic understanding on double entry bookkeeping. 
Then, I started to put some of it into practice and suddenly realized I am
just as lost as I was in the beginning.  Here’s an example of a business
sale entry as it would appear in our Quicken accounts.

<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t377851/Quicken_Sample_Sale.png> 

Now here’s the same entry I’ve attempted in GnuCash.

<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t377851/Sale_Sample_1.png> 

The only true real physical account here is the Etsy account under Assets. 
The others are simply abstract or virtual accounts.  This method certainly
seems to breakout the expenses we’d like to track.  I would like to confirm
whether or not this is the appropriate way to do this.  Are the entries in
the appropriate Dr/Cr columns?  Is there a better or more accurate way?  I
started looking at this and got confused when I started to generate some
reports.  Then I thought, is this the correct way to represent this?  So I
tried another example where we see the total amount a customer payed and
then broke it down.  Here is that example.

<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t377851/Sale_Sample_2.png> 

The problem here is that it doesn’t represent the amount that was actually
deposited into the real account (Etsy).  So unless I’m missing something,
this couldn’t possible be the correct representation.  So I then tried
something that would more accurately represent the transaction.

<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t377851/Sale_Sample_3.png> 

The problem here is now you’re missing important information that requires
tracking (again, unless I’m missing something).  Any help that someone can
provide would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks for taking the time to look
this over and provide some constructive feedback.



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