E.g. "retained earnings" has a balance, but in the set up screen there is a greyed out "zero" and I cannot set up the opening balance. Can I edit that later? I tried this before, but was never able to figure it out.
You did NOT tell us the "state" of the books of this business. And you said trial balance. When I have done this:
a) I closed the (old) books << so the TEMPORARY income and expense accounts would have zero balances. Then I only had to enter the STANDING accounts and for that would use the post closing Balance Sheet. At this point there would be NO "retained earnings" of the virtual sort.
b) BUT -- if you mean "retained earnings" as an actual account (a corporation that paid dividends only from "earnings" might have that) please note that this is a different thing than the "retained earnings" VIRTUAL account of gnucash << that's the net of all the UNCLOSED income and expense accounts appearing on the balance sheet >> If you do need an actual "retained earnings" account in addition to this just create it with a different name to avoid confusion. If you do a periodic "close the books" and want the net here (like I said, a corporation might want this) you'll probably have to do the close the books operation manually (not using the gnucash feature.
I learned bookkeeping in the pen and ink on paper days long before we had computers to assist us.
Michael D Novack _______________________________________________ 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.
