[TriLUG] GnuCash

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Fri, 21 Jun 2013, Alan Porter wrote:

>
> I use GnuCash for personal use and for a small consulting business,

ditto about 15yrs. It's never failed me once in all that time. Completely 
reliable.

> Somehow, I feel like this question about how GnuCash handles donations
> is kind of like asking which word processor is best for a résumé.
> GnuCash is just a general ledger.  It keeps track of accounts, and it's
> up to you to structure your accounts the way you want them.  Maybe some
> tools will have specific walk-through wizards to help you enter certain
> kinds of transactions.  But in the end, they are just transactions
> between accounts.

gnucash is an accounting program. You have to know how to do accounts. There is 
a hefty accounting manual for gnucash. I started with the first two chapters in 
the Schaum's book on Accounting. I have needed help from accounting knowledgable 
people over the years. How to do things is not always obvious, but in retrospect 
you can see that it's right.

As we found out from Enron, there are any number of ways of accounting for 
money, all of them right.

I set up my ledgers exactly the way the tax forms are setup.

> I asked my dad (an accountant) about setting up accounts for things that
> were not obvious to me.  For example, I did not know how TriLUG should
> track donations and expenses for BarCamp 2013.  In that case, it was as
> simple as creating a "BarCamp donations" account in the INCOME account
> hierarchy, a "BarCamp expenses" account in the EXPENSES account
> hierarchy, and a "PayPal" account in the ASSETS account hierarchy.  Then
> you move amounts from one account to another as stuff happens.

you do this sort of thing all the time.

Joe
-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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