[GNC] new user woes

[Stan Brown]

On 2023-03-11 10:23, Jamie Tolbert wrote:
> Originally , I thought I would just pay each bill, and credit owner
> equity and debit the bill, but that seems very cumbersome and confusing,

I mean no disrespect -- every one of us GnuCash users had to learn these
things at some point, if we didn't already know them before coming to
GnuCash.

Unless you just made a "thinko", writing the above shows that your first
step is not to get help with using GnuCash, but rather to learn about
double-entry bookkeeping. There are a zillion books, and one is as good
as another for teaching the basics, which is all you need. (But this is
section 2.1 of the Tutorial and Concepts Guide.
<https://code.gnucash.org/docs/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_basics.html>
Did you skip over that section?)

GnuCash is very much the old pen-and-ink double-entry bookkeeping,
transferred to the computer. (This is different from most other
accounting programs, which seem to think they know a way to do
bookkeeping than the one that has survived for upwards of eight
centuries.) It's not hard to master the general concepts of double-entry
bookkeeping, but it _is_ absolutely essential. Otherwise you won't have
a prayer of getting your bookkeeping right in GnuCash.

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com