[GNC] Small business accounting importing transactions

[David Cousens]

Rob,

Not sure of the details of how Stripe operates but presume it is somewhat
similar to paypal.How you record it will depend upon the detail of the
procedure they use. I treat my Paypal account as a Liability account as I
can also make payments from it. In my case it is directly connected to a
bank account and my Paypal account has direct debit/credit access to that
bank account and unless i have a positive balance in my Paypal account it
will debit funds from my bank account as required. It is so long since I
sold anything using it I cannot remember if it automatically credits funds
received. If I remember correctly I had to manually transfer funds as
required. As the balance in a Paypal account always has to be >=0, I should
really treat it as an asset but I set it up as a Liability and as the
balance is at or near 0 most of the time, so I am happy keeping it that way. 
My transactions are all imported as OFX from my bank and CSV from Paypal. 

My bank records only have the amount of any debits and/or credits to the
paypal account and hence have no information pertaining to fees and charges.
I only receive this when I download a CSV statement from Paypal which
details the amounts received and fees and charges. I keep separate Income
sub accounts and Expense subaccounts for the Paypal transactions. A sale
would be recorded in the Paypal account as follows:

Liability :Paypal                                         Dr zzzz
Income:Paypal Sales                                               Cr  xxxx
Expenses: Paypal Fees and Charges            Dr yyy

where xxxx=yyy+zzzz  or you could consider this as two transactions

Liability:Paypal                                         Dr xxxx
Income:Paypal Sales                                               Cr xxxx

and 

Expenses: Paypal Fees and Charges            Dr yyy
Liability:Paypal                                                       Cr
yyy

As the CSV record from Paypal usually contains the fees and sales as
separate line item,s the second format is a better description of what is
imported and recorded for me. The import matcher assigns credit entries to
the Paypal  account as Fees and Charges and Dr entries as Income  (after
initially manually setting these accounts during import and importing the
data to train the matcher process). The matcher uses other tokens in the
description to make this assignment and not the credit/debit status of the
transaction AFAIK, and generally handles payments I might make from the
account as well now although I often have to manually select the correct
expense account.  I preprocess the CSV file before import (Paypal supplies a
lot of extraneous information I don't need but I now have a set of stored
import settings which simply ignore the unwanted fields supplied by Paypal
and just selects the relevant columns) and arrange it to import easily
(usually only copying the foreign currency conversion info to the
description field and deleting the currency conversion records supplied by
Paypal. My Paypal account is in AUD and I sometimes have international sales
in other currencies. I don't treat the foreign sales in a separate account
for the other currencies but simply copy the currency conversion info into
the Description field before import so I can locate the foreign currency
amounts if I need to. I keep the raw downloaded files as well as any files
modified for import just so i have a complete trail and can track any
errors.

The import matcher usually recognizes duplicate information in the bank
record imports which match transfer transactions from the Paypal  import (or
vice versa depending on the import order) and flags them as matched 
duplicates not to be imported. I usually check that Gnucash has done this
correctly  before completing the import but once setup it usually gets
things right.

Can't tell you how to handle Stripe as I don't know how it works and what
data it supplies but perhaps the above description may help you set it up.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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