[GNC] Setting up chart of accounts

Justin Haynes justin at justinhaynes.com
Fri Mar 8 12:48:53 EST 2019


Teresa, At the risk of going off topic, hang in there.  :-)   I am not an
accountant and only learned bookkeeping by having the title of "Treasurer"
fall upon me for a non-profit I am involved in.  We needed to use
Quickbooks Online.  Around the same time, I started doing my own finances
in GNUCash.

My experience has been that it is really difficult to start books, and once
you have it nailed down it is much much easier.

On top of that, my opinion is that it is harder to get started with
GNUCash, and much much easier to keep using GNUCash.  Harder because not
many programs work like GNUCash does anymore, but so much easer to keep
using because it is so consistent from version to version.  You can learn
these skills now and you won't have to worry about some company changing
everything ever 3 years and dragging you in a new direction.  GNUCAsh is as
consistent as accounting should be, and it uses *real accounting concepts*,
so it is really universal.

Lastly, the user community is wonderful.  The knowledge is out there, and
the typical user (seems to me) has been using it for years.

Let us know how it goes. Liz experience is in line with mine.  When you
start the account you have an opportunity to transfer from opening
balance.  IT's been a while for me as well.

My opinion is that it is better to have more accounts and more structure
than too little.  You can always delete a subaccounts like
"Expenses:Victuals:Coffee:Retail"  "Expenses:Victuals:Food" and be prompted
to move *all* the transactions into "Expenses:Victuals".  Then you can
rename "Expenses:Victuals" to "Expenses:Food".  But it is much harder to
decide later that you want to split "Expenses:Food" into
"Expenses:Food:Restaurant" and "Expenses:Food:Grocery", becuase you'll have
to redo the transactions to file them into the separate new accounts.

Is your billing taken care of or are you setting up A/P and A/R?  There are
quite a few business owners on the list as well who have experience with
that.  I use A/P for my own personal finances because I love being able to
find all my invoices in one place, and so I can quickly find out if a line
item in checking means I actually paide the whole bill or over paid, etc...

Good luck!,

Justin

On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 3:17 AM Liz <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 07 Mar 2019 14:40:28 -0500
> Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > Since you say you are experienced in accounting (but new to gnucash I
> > think what you are asking is "if I have an account A and I want it to
> > be a child of account B, how do I do this (in gnucash)?"
> >
> > Yes?
> >
> > If so, what you want to do is "edit" account A which will give you a
> > chance to specify account B is its parent.
> >
> > Try it where it is easy. For example, under the main parent Assets
> > you probably want children "current assets" and "fixed assets". Then
> > under "current assets" you probably want "checking account",
> > "undeposited cash", etc.
>
> What isn't clear is that you can change things - you can move accounts
> and give them new parents, and so on.
> If you don't get it quite right at first, you can edit it and fix it.
>
> Liz
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