On 2020-08-09 17:02, Marilyn Graves Kimple via gnucash-user wrote: > Sounds promising. It seems to me if I posted a check, for example, directly > to a "tithe payable" liability account I would not need a separate tithe > expense account.
You do if you want to know easily how much you've tithed. The expense account will rise steadily throughout the year (or whatever accounting period you use), but the liability account will repeatedly rise, then fall back to zero when you write the check. Yes, the information is in the liability account, but you'd have to do manual addition to get the total amount tithed. There's another, less obvious but more fundamental reason. When you make a credit to that liability account because you've recognized the need to tithe a certain amount, where is the corresponding debit? There _must_ be one, and the only logical place is an expense account. When you have income, you will debit 10% of that to an expense account called Charity (or perhaps a sub-account under charity), and credit _either_ Assets:Cash and Banks if you write the check immediately, _or_ Liabilities:Tithes payable to (institution name) if you're going to write the check later. When you make a payment that was deferred, debit the liability and credit Assets:Cash and Banks. >From a lot of the things you've said, I suspect that you're very new to double-entry bookkeeping. GnuCash absolutely requires you to understand double-entry concepts, or you'll liable to tangle yourself up. I strongly urge you to work through the GC tutorial as a way of getting acclimated. Or you could google for "double-entry bookkeeping" -- I just did, and the first few entries look helpful. -- Regards, Stan Brown Tehachapi, CA, USA https://BrownMath.com https://OakRoadSystems.com _______________________________________________ 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.
