TLDR; * Pick a default account and get wife to update the account in GnuCash * Experience will teach her to put more meaningful descriptions on transactions * Consolidate accounts * Maybe a PayPal account is not needed in GnuCash * Credit/Debit terms are ambiguous and confusing, Deposit/Withdrawal is clear.
lol, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Based on responses I received previously to a similar question most users don't understand the issue of not being able to assign a final account when data is imported. All you can do is set things up for your wife to fix the accounts. There are two reasons to allocate accounts to transactions; firstly tax, and secondly to manage the expenses. All the business needs below are done as cash accounting in GnuCash without the Business features. With the sudden death of my parent that looked after the finances, I worked through something similar, social security income, rental property, multiple accounts, and no idea of the financial arrangements. As you say there are transactions you cannot know which account applies at the time of importing. We worked through it identifying a few tough months where expenses are much greater than income but overall was okay. Then we went through a process of closing all the accounts except for a working account which works well for someone with little bookwork experience. My daughter is another example, one account with mixed work expenses and rentvester. It seems that generation don't use credit cards but move available cash to higher interest accounts, until they get a loan. Personally, I download the bank accounts as csv, and found I could classify something like 80% of transactions with a dozen text strings in a spreadsheet. I take the opportunity to change the text to capitalise the first letter so they are more readable in GnuCash. In my daughter's case, most of the unclassified transactions were entertainment so everything that wasn't classified went into the entertainment account by default. The next step is to sit them in front of the computer with the default account, show them how to change accounts and create new ones, then leave them to it. For example, with the crazy way insurance loyalty tax works you need to renegotiate policies each year to get a competitive rate and I can never pick the car and rental insurance which are similar amounts at similar times. They'll make a bit of a mess of it but after a couple of goes they will be OK and hopefully, by the third time they will take it over. Once they do this they will put more meaningful descriptions on transactions. My view is a single account is adequate for personal, work and rental transactions, ie light business. My PayPal setup draws the required amount from my bank for each transaction so I assign the bank account transactions to the expenditure account and don't have a PayPal Account in GnuCash. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: 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.
