beginning balance of income and expense accounts

[Adrien Monteleone]

I first started to type that as my reply till I took a closer look at her entries. Equity increases with a credit, but you can’t have a credit to equity and a credit to income to increase both without one or more debits to other accounts to balance the transaction.

Though it doesn’t hurt to check that setting to ensure it is sane for your personal view of things.

When you think about what income and expenses are, they really can’t have opening balances. Technically you can, but then they’d function as ’negative entries’ with an effect of being ‘prior period’ corrections once all the math works out. It’s just too confusing to bother.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Mar 24, 2018, at 3:30 PM, Dave H <hellvee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Check your Preferences >> Accounts >> Reverse Balanced Accounts setting - I
> have mine set to "Credit Accounts" which reverses the balance in my
> Equity:Opening Balances account.
> 
> Cheers Dave H.
> 
> 
> On 25 March 2018 at 06:09, Lori Norden <lnorden at mchsi.com> wrote:
> 
>> I am starting Gnucash in the beginning of the year.  As I’m entering the
>> beginning balance for each income and expense account, a transfer is being
>> made to my Equity Opening Balance account.
>> 
>> For income beginning balance entries – credits income; debits Equity
>> Opening Balance
>> For expense beginning balance entries – debits expense, credits Equity
>> Opening Balance
>> 
>> The problem is my Equity is reduced by the amount of net income I made as
>> of the beginning date, but should be increased.
>> 
>> Should I be offsetting the beginning balances for income and expense to
>> something other than Equity Opening Balance?  That’s what I thought the
>> instructions indicated I should do.
>> 
>> Thanks for your help
>> 
>> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
>> 
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