[GNC] Newby questions opening accounts

[David Cousens]

Peter,

Q1  You can create transactions between any of your assets and liability
accounts at any time. The setup routine gives you the opportunity to do this
while setting upp the accounts. It is just a normal transaction but you
would normally create this at the date on which you open the books  with the
balances of the requisite external accounts at that date.

Q2.  Liabilities would not be kept under Equity in any accounting practice
anywhere. Your previous treasurer was not following any standard accounting
practice.  It will actually work since the debit and credit entries have the
same sense for Liability and Equity accounts, but it removes the ability of
the balance of the Equity accounts to reflect the overall financial state of
the set of books and a Balance Sheet report would be effectively useless
without external manipulation.

Q3 .Using the account numbering scheme is the way to make accounts appear in
a particular order within the standard top level account headings Assets,
Liabilities, Equity, Income and Expenses. There are standard numbering
scheme often used in some accounting practice. There are some discussions of
the reasons for numbering schemes and some standard practice at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts#:~:text=Account%20numbers%20are%20often%20five,%2C%22%20it%20is%20an%20asset.
and
https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/chart-of-accounts-numbering.html or
https://www.accountingcoach.com/chart-of-accounts/explanation. Some counties
require a particular order in the presentation of accounts in financial
reports. The account numbers in GnuCash are a multidigit number with no
internal punctuation AFAIK so make sure you have enough digits for the numbe
rof levels of sub-accounts in your account heirarchy.

David Cousens




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David Cousens
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