Christine, Gnucash is a double entry accounting system. What this means is that any transaction affects at least two accounts. For example when you purchase something your bank account is credited by the amount of the purchase any purchase is also an expense so an expense account has to be debited by the amount of the purchase in the second component of the transaction. These two components of the one transactions are referred to in Gnucash as "splits". The same methodology is applied to any other sort of transaction, it will always consist of at least two components ( and sometimes more) affecting at least two accounts. In any single transaction the sum of the debit and the sum of the credit components of the splits of that transaction must be equal
The Gnucash Tutorial and Concepts guide (https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/) along with the Wikipedia articles on double entry bookkeeping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system will give you some background information. Gnucash follows what is called the Accounting Equation or American approach in this article. The article on the Accounting equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation) also provides some useful background. That said, it is possible when you are entering a transaction and create the deposit split to your bank account (this will be a debit to that account if you use the accounting terms) what you are seeing is the other component/split of the transaction being automatically created. If you have not yet created appropriate income accounts, it may be assigning your bank account as the default account for this second split which will be a credit. If you click in the account field in the second split, you should be able to select a different account from your chart of accounts. For a deposit to your bank account, the account for the second split would normally be an income account for money coming from an external source or another asset account if you are transferring money between accounts ofr example. David ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.