Canada Need help general idea for new accounting software user

[edy]

Hi everyone,

I'm a new user of GNUcash and trying to wrap my head around the whole double-entry system of accounting.

I have a point-of-sale terminal POS which accepts VISA, M/C and Debit transactions. This gets paid to me and then gets deposited into my chequing account. I need to know how to set up the import of my POS transactions and things seem to be "backwards". I'll explain...

Say I import all my VISA payments, I put that under INCOME > POS-VISA. However, to do the double-entry counterpart I then do a "transfer" to the ASSETS > CURRENT ASSETS > CHEQUING account. When ends up happening though is the account that says INCOME > POS-VISA is showing it as "Charge" so it is negative, and when I do the transfer to the ASSETS > CURRENT ASSETS > CHEQUING it shows up there as a Withdrawal... Backwards!

It goes into INCOME > POS-VSA as Income (not charge) and then transfer would make a copy of the entry also in my CHEQUING ACCOUNT and have it appear there as a DEPOSIT (not withdrawal). Unless I am understanding this all wrong, or is GNUCash doing it backwards? Do I have to put a "minus" sign in front of everything?

The other question is how do I assume the entire BATCH of imported transactions.... Is there somewhere I can specify in the CSV table where to put the transfer? Like add another comma and put in something to tell gnucash to automatically do the transfer?

Any help would be appreciated. This is just the first step in a long list of questions. I will also eventually have VISA EXPENSES which then need to be paid from the chequing account, and I would like to figure out how to do the transfer function for that and double-entry system. But one step at a time.... Thanks!

 

[edy]

Ok, so I imported a CSV into GNUCash that has date, description, amount for an INCOME coming via my point-of-sale terminal (people paying me through credit/debit cards). In the IMPORT WIZARD you choose what the columns represent... Date, Description and for the last one I would pick DEPOSIT (I did this before and everything was backwards).

This time I chose WITHDRAWAL (although how can an income be a withdrawal?) and it properly imported it and put the positive values under the INCOME column (instead of the CHARGE column). Then when I did the Transfer I made it go to my ASSETS > CHEQUING account and it put in the there as a DEPOSIT. So my balance so far is going up like normal (positive) as is the INCOME field.

So is this just a BUG in the importing Wizard? or am I thinking through backwards?

As a test, I will also download the latest v3.1 for Windows (I'm using 2.6 on Ubuntu which is the latest version they have for Linux) and see what happens when I import the same CSV file in the Windows version.

 

[edy]

I tried the GNUCash v3.1 in Windows 10 and guess what, it has way more import options including the ability to automatically designate the transfer function for all the imported transactions (unlike 2.6). So it looks like I'm going to be using 3.1 and resort to running a VM of WIndows.