beginning balance of income and expense accounts

[DaveC49]

Lori,

The Opening Balances account is an account of type equity. *It is always the
offset account for the opening balances of all other accounts.* 

Your procedure for starting to use Gnucash from the 30/9 is fine. The entry
for the opening balance for your income and expense accounts at 30/9 will be
something like:

                                           debit      credit
Income                                              xxxx
Equity:OpeningBalances        xxxx

Expense                               yyyy
Equity:Opening Balances                    yyyy

where xxxx and yyyy are the closing balances for income and expenses at 30/9
from your previous accounting program.  

More than likely thoug,h you will want to transfer the closing balances for
all the subaccounts of Income and Expense (and also Assets, Liabilities and
other Equity accounts you may have  at this date rather than just the Income
and Expense ( and other accounts) totals. In that case the entries labelled
Income and Expense would become e.g. Income:Sales  or Expenses:Wages and you
would create a similar entry for each subaccounts of each type of account. 

As someone mentioned earlier you can then run the Reports for Profit and
Loss and a Balance Sheet at 30/9 and these should match the similar reports
from your previous accounting system at that date. There is probably not
much point in entering the Jan-Sep data if you will still have access to the
other accounting system whenyou have to file your end of year financials.

If Microsoft Money has the ability to export data in QIF format (I'm not a
user of it) if you do want to import the Jan-Sep data it is possible to
import it into Gnucash. There is a FAQ on the Gnucash Wiki 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_How_do_I_import_my_data_from_Microsoft_Money.3F
<http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_How_do_I_import_my_data_from_Microsoft_Money.3F> 
. (CSV import is also possible - my understanding is that the new improved
csv importer is in the current 2.7 beta release and will be standard in the
next 3.0 stable release. If you do want to  use CSV it would probably be
wise to wait for the v3.0 release before importing data.)  If you search the
archives for this list you will probably find some other references to
importing from MS Money. 

Your Opening balances would then be those at 31/12 of the previous year. You
would have to delete the entries at 30/9 and replace them with the
appropriate entries for 31/12 of the previous year. If you do decide to do
this it is generally better to import something like a month at a time and
reconciling the balances to your previous set of accounts as it simplifies
finding and correcting any import errors which might occur.  Good luck

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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