On Wednesday, 17 April 2019 00:35:15 BST Christopher Lam wrote: > I suspect there's vocabulary issue here. > > Justin are you talking about Dividends whereby the business owner (with > shareholders) sends monies to shareholders? I don't know how to book these > transactions. Asset:Bank -> Expenses:Dividends? >
That one. That's how I do it, but OP has been using a reference text online which says quite forcefully that Dividends Paid are not an expense, because expenses are temporary account(s) used to calculate a year's profit. Dividends are paid out of taxed profits, not trading expense accounts. Said text goes on to explain that the act of declaring a dividend to be payable creates a liability account on the company. When dividends are paid, that liability account is cleared from equity:retained Earnings (presumably company bank balance also reduces, but I haven't thought at length about what the 4th balancing account would be in a GC txn). I think that the OP's point is that if you close the books & have a retained earnings account, the reports which calculate & show retained earnings on the fly don't pay attention if there is already an Equity:RE account in the datafile. Blame GAAP! Maf. _______________________________________________ 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.