[GNC] difficulties I am having

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 21, 2021, at 3:51 PM, Jay Bouxsein <diananjay at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have been using GNUCASH for several years to basically track income and
> expenses for rental properties my wife and I own.  I do not use it for any
> other purposes, I enter all of our expenses and income and then produce a P
> $ L report and send that to our accountant who keeps our historical books
> and prepares our tax returns.  Obviously I could use a spreadsheet as my
> accountant suggested, but I really like your aids in completing the entry
> process, the plus and minus feature, and typing just the first few
> characters and so forth.
> 
>     In the past, we have done all of the data entry in March of the next
> year and it goes fast because we do not have a lot of units (less than 10 )
> and limited suppliers (less than 30).  My procedure is to call up the
> program and it opens to a register automatically, displaying all of our
> transactions from the previous year and all I need to do is update the date
> of the first transaction which by default is the current date.  For
> example, the date displayed was April 21, 2021 and our first transaction
> was for January 2, 2020.  All was going well until we got to March of 2020
> when I could not find an expense account and tried to add a new expense
> account and all hell broke loose. I could not get back to the account
> register data entry screen we always used.  Eventually I figured out that
> the account that I thought was missing actually was not and what I had done
> was to create a nearly duplicate account so I deleted the account that I
> had just created and then I was able to get a screen that looked just like
> the one we always had, but we noticed some differences.
> 
> On our old register screen we used to have a column for deposits to our
> checking account and checks written out of that account.  Now our screen
> shows "Expense" in the column which used to have "Deposit" and "rebate" has
> been substituted for the check amount. That does not seem right to me.  I
> am 72 years old and actually was pretty good with the software which was
> available back in the 70's, 80's & 90's but not so much any more.  I have a
> feeling that my problem should be a simple one to fix, but my weakness in
> dealing with accounting software is holding me back.  I should add that I
> do have a hard copy of a "transction report, Income statement and P&L which
> I have attached to this email in the hope it will give you enough
> information to understand my missive.
> 
> I thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.
> 

IIUC the difference is in the column headings in a register view. If that's the case you're looking at an Expense (not Bank, which is what a checking account should be) account in Register2 view. That's hard to do: You have to start GnuCash with the --extra command-line option and open registers from the Extensions>Reg2>Open Account menu item.

But you chose to illustrate the problem with transaction reports from 2018 and 2019 instead of a screen shot so I wonder if you really mean something else.

Regards,
John Ralls