I do agree with the comments in your previous post that the concept of transactions needs to be explained before or at least in parallel to concept of accounts. I rewrote a fair bit of the basics section of the guide when I was fresh out of an accounting master's which might account for its more technical bias. I haven't revisited the guide much since then but I will take another look at it. It is always a compromise between producing a full scale textbook and brevity that someone will actually read.
Some other accounting software does indeed hide the details of the debit/credit and the accounting equation and double entry from users. I am a convert from software that did that and because that basis was hidden it made understanding the accounts more difficult than it should, particularly during the setup phase of a business. Add to that my highly paid accountant (one of big 4) was not particularly useful. That can be useful for a lot of routine data entry, however it is the edge cases that often require a deeper understanding of the basis of double entry accounting. I disagree however that the non-accounting terminology should be the default. The non-accounting terminology is often not precise in its meaning whereas once you have understood the definitions, the meaning of the accounting terminology and its use is well defined. Accounting is a well documented commercial practice and the double entry system is core to its operation and GnuCash is primarily accounting software, not general financial software although it does a very good job for small operations and can be adapted to that use. It is also an excellent educational tool for formal accounting. I used it as such while doing amaster's and it produced basic reports which conformed well with what was expected for formal accounting reports. David Cousens On Sat, 2023-10-21 at 09:48 +1100, flywire wrote: > https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2023-October/109184.html > Edwin Booth wrote: > > I need to wrap my head around the whole “debit/credit” concept. > > No you don't but you do need to understand the concept of account types and > moving money between them. I've studied economics at Uni, evaluated endless > projects, used a range of accounting software, and worked with > accountants and bookkeepers without being aware of how credit and debit is > defined in accounting. I rarely used the terms, and most people that > understood them would realise the common understanding is wrong and use the > terms in a general sense or avoid them. > > It's a pretty meaningless discussion commercial projects avoid to reduce > confusion. The user documentation would be clearer with simple language: > https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2023-May/106929.html > > Regards > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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. _______________________________________________ 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.
