[GNC] Splitting a Transaction (Newbie Question)

Sun Dec 18 06:09:18 EST 2022

Good Morning from a very wet and windy Wales

Thank you all very much for your helpful comments.

Thank you also Michael for reminding me about the 'Journal'.  As a fresh 
faced Articled Clerk in the early 1970s we came across a small number of 
firms that still had hand written leather bound Journals.  Naturally we 
ACs were not at all surprised as that is what was written about in the 
text books we had to read. Of course, many of the smaller clients had no 
books at all and would just give us a big cardboard box full of 
invoices, cheque book stubs, empty fag packets and a few bank statements 
which we were supposed to turn into a set of accounts.  The more 
financially aware small businesses used the analysed cash book system.

As I understand it Quicken. up to and including the Millenium Edition 
(which is what I am finally going to abandon), had the analysed cash 
book (actually bank book) as its conceptual model.  That made a great 
deal of sense given the marketing thrust for the product.  I am very 
happy with that model and am assuming that I can run GNUCash like that 
with the bank account as the central player.

By the term Bank Card payment I meant Debit Card which here in the UK 
seems to be the major form of payment since the Covid Pandemic. I 
certainly have not used Bank of England cash for more than two years. 
The impact on Quicken has been that more transactions have been recorded 
every month as every card slip gets entered.  Previously one would 
withdraw cash (one entry) and then spend that cash on the myriad small 
transactions of life which were not recorded.

Credit card transactions were included by treating the monthly statement 
as 'card slip'.  Thus every listed purchase is a debit in the 
appropriate account and the total bill amount is the credit in the Bank. 
So you can see why I am interested in Split Transactions.

Investigation this morning has established:
    * The system is set up in Basic Ledger Mode
    * The test transactions were entered in the Bank Account
    * The Bank Account shows no record of the test transactions
    * The debits have appeared in the named expense accounts as you have 
forecast
    * A new account has appeared called 'Imbalance-GBP' that contains 
the correct (and incorrect credits) that I would have expected in the 
Bank Account.

This leads me to a new question.  Is the 'Bank Account' a reserved name 
which I must use for my bank account to make it work?  It is not called 
that currently.  In Quicken one had to allocate a type to accounts which 
included bank account, savings account, investment, etc.  I had assumed 
that these may have carried across in the QIF file but perhaps not.  I 
have just looked at the bank account settings in 'Edit Account' and see 
that it is labelled as a Bank account. So there must be something else I 
am not doing which makes GNUCash think that a payment in the Bank 
Account is not meant to be there.

Many thanks for all the help.

Regards

Pete

------ Original Message ------
From: "Michael or Penny Novack" <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Sent: Saturday, 17 Dec, 2022 At 23:04
Subject: Re: [GNC] Splitting a Transaction (Newbie Question)

At this point things look good.  So what does one do next? Press Return 
seems like a safe bet.  However it is far from it.  All that happens is 
that the whole transaction disappears.  The alternative, using another 
Tab is almost as bad.  The £1.99 debit in Groceries is now replaced by a 
£5.25 credit and the £7.24 credit from the bank has disappeared.  Ok, it 
makes the books appear to balance since double entry is maintained but 
the whole process seem astonishingly random.
If any kind reader can advise on the correct way yo handle this simple 
task I would be most grateful as I do simple domestic accounting but 
have lots of split debit analysis.
You might have completed the split (depends on what you meant by "whole 
thing disappeared").
Some background might help. In the old days of double entry (before 
computer apps to shortcut bits) a transaction was FIRST entered into a 
book called a "journal" and later each line of the journal entry was 
ported to the ledger (in the account on that line). Here gnucash is 
letting you skip entering into the journal (has a "virtual journal") for 
simple transactions affecting just two accounts. But when you enter a 
split, you are in "journal mode".
I think what you meant by "disappeared" is that the journal view 
disappeared and you were back in the account view in which you started 
(but something about what you see there indicates the transaction was a 
split). You could go to one of the other accounts affected (or all of 
the other accounts) to see if what appears there is right. If so, all 
done.
Michael D Novack

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Dr Peter Cuthbert
Creuddyn
Coedlan Y Plas

Llangawsai
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1HJ
01970 623 447