Teresa, At the risk of going off topic, hang in there. :-) I am not an accountant and only learned bookkeeping by having the title of "Treasurer" fall upon me for a non-profit I am involved in. We needed to use Quickbooks Online. Around the same time, I started doing my own finances in GNUCash.
My experience has been that it is really difficult to start books, and once you have it nailed down it is much much easier. On top of that, my opinion is that it is harder to get started with GNUCash, and much much easier to keep using GNUCash. Harder because not many programs work like GNUCash does anymore, but so much easer to keep using because it is so consistent from version to version. You can learn these skills now and you won't have to worry about some company changing everything ever 3 years and dragging you in a new direction. GNUCAsh is as consistent as accounting should be, and it uses *real accounting concepts*, so it is really universal. Lastly, the user community is wonderful. The knowledge is out there, and the typical user (seems to me) has been using it for years. Let us know how it goes. Liz experience is in line with mine. When you start the account you have an opportunity to transfer from opening balance. IT's been a while for me as well. My opinion is that it is better to have more accounts and more structure than too little. You can always delete a subaccounts like "Expenses:Victuals:Coffee:Retail" "Expenses:Victuals:Food" and be prompted to move *all* the transactions into "Expenses:Victuals". Then you can rename "Expenses:Victuals" to "Expenses:Food". But it is much harder to decide later that you want to split "Expenses:Food" into "Expenses:Food:Restaurant" and "Expenses:Food:Grocery", becuase you'll have to redo the transactions to file them into the separate new accounts. Is your billing taken care of or are you setting up A/P and A/R? There are quite a few business owners on the list as well who have experience with that. I use A/P for my own personal finances because I love being able to find all my invoices in one place, and so I can quickly find out if a line item in checking means I actually paide the whole bill or over paid, etc... Good luck!, Justin On Fri, Mar 8, 2019 at 3:17 AM Liz <ed...@billiau.net> wrote: > On Thu, 07 Mar 2019 14:40:28 -0500 > Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepf...@comcast.net> wrote: > > > Since you say you are experienced in accounting (but new to gnucash I > > think what you are asking is "if I have an account A and I want it to > > be a child of account B, how do I do this (in gnucash)?" > > > > Yes? > > > > If so, what you want to do is "edit" account A which will give you a > > chance to specify account B is its parent. > > > > Try it where it is easy. For example, under the main parent Assets > > you probably want children "current assets" and "fixed assets". Then > > under "current assets" you probably want "checking account", > > "undeposited cash", etc. > > What isn't clear is that you can change things - you can move accounts > and give them new parents, and so on. > If you don't get it quite right at first, you can edit it and fix it. > > Liz > _______________________________________________ > 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. > _______________________________________________ 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.