Accounts

Overview

To manage your money efficiently you have to get organised in some way. That's where accounts come in. They are used to classify your incomes, expenses and assets, and from that point of view they are somewhat similiar to Quicken™ categories. You can imagine accounts as containers holding money and transactions (see the section called Transactions) as money transfers between accounts. For example you can think of spending money on computer parts as of a flow between Cash and Computer accounts.

To ease navigation between accounts you can group them into subaccounts of a higher level account. For example Bills, Food and Personal could be subaccounts of Expenses account. Higher level accounts summarize their subaccounts - in the previous example Expenses would show overall sum of expenses. It just means that amount of account is not only influenced by transactions dealing directly with that account, but also by transactions taking or giving money to or from its subaccounts.

Every account has four properties assigned to it.

1. The most important one is its name. It is used for identyfication purposes and because of that should be unique. It can be up to 32 characters long, longer names will be truncated.

   Tip: There probably some accounts which you would like to give the same name. To solve that problem add name of their parent account after the main name as in Maintenance (home) and Maintenance (car) or Misc (expenses) and Misc (food).

2. Parent property describes position of a account in the accounts chart. It specifies accounts parent or is <None> for a top-level account.

3. Reversed flag specifies how the account should show amount of money it is holding. If the flag is on, than the amount is negated before displaying it. It is usually used in income and expense types of accounts. That way incomes amount is shown positive, though you take money from incomes.

4. Unlimited flag specifies if the account's amount shown should ignore limit expression (see the section called Limits). This flag is usually used in asset types of accounts. With that flag the amount of money in your wallet is independent of limits. No matter if other accounts are limited to only current month, the state of your wallet stays unchanged. With this flag set to off the Cash account would rather show the account's ballance.

At the end of this section I would like to state, that accounts are just abstraction. You can do whatever you like with them. You can for example create a subaccount of Checking account named Reconciled and put there the transactions reconciled with your mothly statement of account send to you by bank. It doesn't matter that the subaccount doesn't exist in the real world, it is just a useful conception helping to separate reconciled transactions from the rest.

Editing commands

To create a new account use Accounts->New menu command. The following dialog will be presented to you:

Fill in desired information and press OK button or just the Enter key.

You cen edit accounts by selecting one in the Accounts tab and choosing Accounts->Edit from the menu. You will be shown a dialog very similiar to the one above.

To delete an account select it and click Accounts->Delete menu button. If there are no transactions associated with this account, it will be deleted. Please note, that it does not delete subaccounts of the account, they are just reparented.

Miscellaneous