I am an ex-quicken user, with no formal accounting training (only gnucash manuals).
I hope to track money between my banking accounts, identify who is receiving payments, and budget (income >= expense). I started by using the wizard for common + investment accounts. I didn’t see a problem until my investments generated an IRA distribution with money to federal, state, and checking. I didn’t want to record the federal, state deductions as an actual cash expense so I created an “Investment Expense” root expense account to track the payments. Now a new year has started and I’m trying to reuse my account tree but I can not identify why the budget income is not reporting the sum of the income sub-accounts. Thinking my IRA distribution solution was the root of the problem I found in gnucash-user “Accounting Treatment of Taxable IRA Distributions” thread. There is a statement of a solution which I do not understand, “How did you open your books? I bet your opening transaction had the balancing amount of that IRA lumped into equity. But you should instead had it as a "deferred income" under equity (a child). The equity total still correct, but now it becomes easy for you to "undefer" that income as you take a distribution. Understand? The distribution has TWO effects. One is to reduce the IRA balance as it increases money in your checking account. The second is to "undefer" that amount of income, reduce "deferred" and increase current income (your regular income account).” Would someone please explain this solution as accounts and transactions? Thanks, very much, Morris _______________________________________________ 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.
