On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:41 AM, Rick F <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm not an accountant, but the general format for a ledger is usually > Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income and Expenses. Customer invoices would > typically be under Assets:Accounts Receivable and supplier invoices would be > under Liabilities:Accounts Payable. > > Assuming you're using ledger for a U.S. business, take a look at Schedule C, > since that's likely what you're going to have to fill out on a regular basis > from your ledger. My expense categories, for example, match the categories > on lines 18-27. My revenue categories come from lines 1-4.
I endorse this method as well - makes tax time much easier. As a structure, I have a top level "BusinessName" category for the business, as well as top level "Customers" and "Suppliers" categories. Someone paying for work performed service would look like this: 2015-01-01 Fixed Widget BusinessName:Assets:AccountsReceivable:Labor $100 Customers:CustomerName:AccountsPayable -$100 Them paying the bill would look like this - it's a 4-part transaction so that everything balances on both ends - I wrote about this "Transfer pattern" from a while ago: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ledger-cli/K7EgJQuEQ_M/WGzdFhtuqwIJ 2015-01-02 Payment for Work Performed, Check #1234 BusinessName:Transfer:ChecksUncashed $100 BusinessName:Assets:AccountsReceivable:Labor -$100 Customers:CustomerName:Equity -$100 Customers:CustomerName:AccountsPayable $100 Then when the check gets deposited: 2015-01-03 Deposit to Checking BusinessName:Assets:CheckingAccount $100 BusinessName:Transfer:ChecksUncashed -$100 This way, at the end, the customer's balance should be zero, and you can reconcile your deposits easily. > Making each individual invoice its own account is very GnuCash, but I prefer > to keep my account hierarchy pretty clean and instead use tags to keep track > of individual invoices. I think it makes closing out the books at the end > of the year simpler. I'm not going to say everyone agrees with me on that > one, though. I agree with this. You end up with account overload, and have problems if someone makes a payment for multiple transactions with one transaction. - Zack -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
