[GNC] help to set up equity sub-accounts opening balances

David Cousens davidcousens at bigpond.com
Wed Aug 5 18:20:13 EDT 2020


Marilyn,

There should be no problem creating sub accounts of Equity at all but it is not really clear that you would need to. I
have just created a sub account of equity and I have several existing sub accounts of equity.
 
The mailing list archives have many discussions around allocating money particularly where that money is tied to a
specific purpose with legal implications if it is spent for another purpose which you might find useful. These
discussions are usually associated with non-profits where funds may be donated and pledged for a specific purpose. No
one so far has written any sort of general guide to this however.

Transactions to equity are generally, but not exclusively,to record existing balances when you open a new book.If you
are dealing with a profit making enterprise your transactions will generally be between
an asset account and either an income or expense account and it is only at the end of the accounting period in
traditional accounting you would transfer the profits from the income and expense accounts to equity to rezero the
temporary accounts for the next period. Gnucash has no real need to do this as reports can be prepared for a specific
period without doing so ,but you can optionally do traditional accounts closure if you wish.

David Cousens





On Tue, 2020-08-04 at 15:07 +0000, Marilyn Graves Kimple via gnucash-user wrote:
> I have used double-entry bookkeeping although I am not trained. In the past I have used what I called 'fund' accounts
> as sub-accounts for my equity account: home maintenance, tithe, and emergency savings, for example. I divide my
> 'profits' each month and accrue them through an expense account to accounts which are part of my total equity. 
> The object is to keep a running total for expenses which are typically annual rather than a month-by-month total. Can
> I do this with GnuCash? I think I really need to do this.
> Setting up my accounts initially I tried setting up sub-accounts under the parent Equity, and then under the Equity
> sub-account Opening Balances, and it only allows me to transfer to Open Balances in each case. The funds in my
> assets/liabilities account are not transferable 1 to 1 to one of these other accounts.
> I may have to change the way I do things, but I would really appreciate help with this.  mgk
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