Lori, The Opening Balances account is an account of type equity. *It is always the offset account for the opening balances of all other accounts.*
Your procedure for starting to use Gnucash from the 30/9 is fine. The entry for the opening balance for your income and expense accounts at 30/9 will be something like: debit credit Income xxxx Equity:OpeningBalances xxxx Expense yyyy Equity:Opening Balances yyyy where xxxx and yyyy are the closing balances for income and expenses at 30/9 from your previous accounting program. More than likely thoug,h you will want to transfer the closing balances for all the subaccounts of Income and Expense (and also Assets, Liabilities and other Equity accounts you may have at this date rather than just the Income and Expense ( and other accounts) totals. In that case the entries labelled Income and Expense would become e.g. Income:Sales or Expenses:Wages and you would create a similar entry for each subaccounts of each type of account. As someone mentioned earlier you can then run the Reports for Profit and Loss and a Balance Sheet at 30/9 and these should match the similar reports from your previous accounting system at that date. There is probably not much point in entering the Jan-Sep data if you will still have access to the other accounting system whenyou have to file your end of year financials. If Microsoft Money has the ability to export data in QIF format (I'm not a user of it) if you do want to import the Jan-Sep data it is possible to import it into Gnucash. There is a FAQ on the Gnucash Wiki http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_How_do_I_import_my_data_from_Microsoft_Money.3F <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_How_do_I_import_my_data_from_Microsoft_Money.3F> . (CSV import is also possible - my understanding is that the new improved csv importer is in the current 2.7 beta release and will be standard in the next 3.0 stable release. If you do want to use CSV it would probably be wise to wait for the v3.0 release before importing data.) If you search the archives for this list you will probably find some other references to importing from MS Money. Your Opening balances would then be those at 31/12 of the previous year. You would have to delete the entries at 30/9 and replace them with the appropriate entries for 31/12 of the previous year. If you do decide to do this it is generally better to import something like a month at a time and reconciling the balances to your previous set of accounts as it simplifies finding and correcting any import errors which might occur. Good luck David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.