GnuCash supports a number of different account types. It is recommended to choose an appropriate account type based on the list of account types described below.

Table 5.8. Types of GnuCash Accounts.

Account Type	Description
Accounts Payable	Accounts Payable are used by businesses to record amounts that must be paid. Example: The business has bought something, but the business has not paid the bill until later. Note Previous versions of this help defined A/P and A/R the other way round.
Accounts Receivable	Accounts Receivable records amounts for which money has not yet been received. Example: A business has sold something and issued a bill, but the client has not payed until later. Note Previous versions of this help defined A/P and A/R the other way round.
Asset	Asset accounts are used for tracking things that are of value and can be used or sold to pay debts. (Normally a placeholder account)
Bank	The Bank account type denotes savings or checking accounts held at a bank or other financial institution. Some of these accounts may bear interest. This is also the appropriate account type for check (debit) cards, which directly withdraw payments from a checking account.
Cash	The Cash account type is used to denote the cash that you store in your wallet, shoe box, piggyback, or mattress.
Credit Card	The Credit Card account type is used to denote credit card accounts, both for cards that allow floating lines of credit (e.g. VISA, MasterCard, or Discover) and with cards that do not permit continuing balances (e.g. American Express)
Currency	Currency Accounts are used for trading currencies.
Equity	Equity accounts are used to store the opening balances when you first start using GnuCash or start a new accounting period.
Expense	Any expense such as food, clothing, taxes, etc. This type is called a category in Quicken.
Income	Any income received from sources such as salary, interest, dividends, etc. This type is called a category in Quicken.
Liability	Liability accounts are used for tracking debts or financial obligations. (Normally a placeholder account)
Mutual Fund	A professionally managed portfolio of stocks and bonds or other investments divided up into shares.
Stock	A share of ownership in a corporation, which entitles its owner to all the risks and rewards that go with it.

The New Account Hierarchy Setup druid described in the first section of this help is a convenient way of setting up a set of accounts to use as a framework of account types.

When new accounts are created the available choices of account types are grayed out according to what type the parent account is. The following list contains the possible choices.

The Chart of Accounts is like a table of contents for your finances. The best way to conceptualize a chart of accounts is as a tree. The main branches represent entire categories or groups, while the leaves of the tree denote individual bank accounts or expense categories. When a summary report is requested, typically only the main branches are shown in the report, rather than the individual accounts. For example, a chart of accounts might look like the following:

Note that accounts not only have names; they have codes, to order the accounts. When a report is generated, the sort order is determined by the numbering. It's customary to have the leaf accounts end in non-zero digits, while parent nodes have increasing numbers of zeros.

GnuCash does not prevent duplicate numbering, although we would encourage you to avoid this. Account codes are treated as numbers in base-36, thus, if you run out of numbers, you can use the letters, a through z.

A sample chart of accounts is shown below. Each account is of a given account type. This example is a combination of some typical business and personal accounts.

The New Account properties dialog consists of two tabs, the General Information tab and the Opening Balance tab. This dialog can be accessed by going to File -> New Account... or by clicking the New toolbar icon in the Account Tree Window.

Creating a New Account involves planning in advance several details that are used in the New Account dialog.

These details are described below.

5.2.3.1. General Information

The General Information tab is used to access the basic information about the account. It provides a way of connecting the account to stock information if it is one of the currency, mutual fund or stock account types. It can also be flagged as a Tax Related or Placeholder account.

There are five panes in this tab. Below the panes are check-boxes to mark the account as Tax Related and a Placeholder account. The Tax Related check-box means that this account has been flagged to be included in Tax Exports. This flag should only be set for Income and Expense type accounts. The Placeholder check-box means this account is not used for transaction data. This check-box is used to enable a hierarchy or chart of accounts to be setup.

The top pane contains the Account Information.

• Account Information: Enter a name for the account such as First Bank Checking.

• Description: This is an optional description for the account.

• Commodity: For most accounts this should be the default, USD (US Dollar) or your local currency symbol. If this account is for a foreign currency then use the Select... button to choose a different currency in the Select currency/security dialog. Use the Select... button to choose a security if this is a mutual fund or stock account.

• Select currency/security: To select a different currency click the Currency/security: drop down list and choose the currency symbol you need. To create a security for mutual fund and stock accounts select the New... button to bring up the New Currency/Security dialog. After the security is created select the Type:(usually the exchange the security is traded on) and the name in the Currency/security: drop down list.

• New Currency/Security: The options here are described in detail in the Security Editor section. Fill in a name, symbol and type.

• Account Code: Enter an optional number code as described in the To Create a Chart of Accounts section.

The next pane contains a list of Account Types. Select a type from the descriptions in the Types of GnuCash Accounts section.

The next pane contains an account tree to choose a Parent Account. To create a new account tree select New top level account. If the parent account is a certain type, then several of the choices in Account Type become out. For example if the Parent Account is Assets then Equity, Expense and Income become This is to help maintain a proper account structure for the Chart of Accounts.

The next pane is the Price Quote Source pane.

• Get On-line Quotes: This check-box is only enabled when currency, mutual fund or stock account types are selected. It is used to enable this account to have quotes downloaded from an on-line source.

• The source for price quotes: Select a quote source from the pull-down menu. Currently supported quote sources include Yahoo, Yahoo Europe, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price, the Vanguard Group, the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and TIAA-CREF. Note that Yahoo will provide price quotes for many mutual funds including Fidelity, T.Rowe Price and Vanguard, and that the quoted prices at Yahoo should be identical to those that may be found at the source sites. If you choose Yahoo Europe, you should append the market code for the security, such as PA for Paris, BE for Berlin, etc. Example: 12150.PA (a Peugeot security in the Paris market). Table 5.9 and Table 5.10 below list codes for various markets.

• Timezone for these quotes: Select the timezone for the source of the on-line quotes you are receiving. For example, Yahoo normally quotes Eastern timezone, so choose America/New York if you use that quote source.

Note

The set of steps needed to properly enable on-line quote updating with the Price Editor are; Create the mutual fund or stock with either the Security Editor or the New Currency/Security dialog described above. Create the Account for the mutual fund or stock with it listed in the Commodity field. Select On-line Quotes, the source for price quotes and Timezone. To determine if the Perl module Finance::Quote is already installed on your system, type “perldoc Finance::Quote” in a terminal window and check to see if there is any documentation available. If you see the documentation, then the module is installed, if you do not see the documentation, then it has not been installed. To install Finance::Quote; Close any GnuCash applications you have running. Locate the folder where GnuCash is installed by searching for “gnc-fq-update” (without the quotes). Change to that directory, open a root shell and run the command “gnc-fq-update” (without the quotation marks). This will launch a Perl CPAN update session that will go out onto the Internet and install the Finance::Quote module on your system. The gnc-fq-update program is interactive, however, with most systems you should be able to answer “no” to the first question: “Are you ready for manual configuration? [yes]” and the update will continue automatically from that point. After installation is complete, you should run the “gnc-fq-dump” test program, in the same directory, distributed with GnuCash to test if Finance::Quote is installed and working properly. Note If you feel uncomfortable about performing any of these steps, please either email the GnuCash-user mailing list (<gnucash-user@gnucash.org>) for help or come to the GnuCash IRC channel on irc.gnome.org. You can also leave out this step and manually update your stock prices. Add a commodity to the Price Editor as described in the Price Editor section of Tool Windows. Select Get Quotes in the Price Editor.

If you wish to update price quotes from the command line, you can do so by the following command;

gnucash --add-price-quotes <gnucash-file-name>

Code List for European Markets

Table 5.9. Code List for European Markets

Code	Market
BC	Barcelona
BE	Berlin
BI	Bilbao
BR	Brême
CO	Copenhagen
D	Dusseldorf
F	Frankfurt
FX	Xetra
H	Hamburg
HA	Hanover
L	London
MA	Madrid
MC	Madrid (M.C.)
MI	Milan
MU	Munich
O	Oslo
PA	Paris
ST	Stockholm
SG	Stuttgart
VA	Valence

Table 5.10. Pseudo-symbols that can be used for TIAA-CREF quotes

Name	Pseudo-symbol
Bond Market	CREFbond
Equity Index	CREFequi
Global Equities	CREFglob
Growth	CREFgrow
Inflation-Linked Bond	CREFinfb
Money Market	CREFmony
Social Choice	CREFsoci
Stock	CREFstok
Teachers PA Select Stock	TIAAsele
Teachers PA Stock Index	TIAAsndx
TIAA Real Estate	TIAAreal

The last pane is the Notes pane. This is used for any additional notes about the account.

The Edit Account dialog consists of just the General Information tab. This tab has the same information that was described in To Create a New Account. To access the Edit Account dialog go to Edit -> Edit Account (menu shortcut Ctrl-E) or click the Edit toolbar icon in the Account Tree Window.

Editing the Chart of Accounts is done within the Parent Account pane of the Edit Account dialog. It is possible to move an account to any part of the Chart of Account. It is recommended to keep accounts generally under the related types of accounts as described in the Types of GnuCash Accounts section. This helps to preserve the Chart of Accounts structure.

To move the selected account to a different parent account just select the account in the Parent Account pane. If New top level account is selected then the account will be move to the top level.

Use "Renumber Subaccounts" to rewrite the account codes for all children of the current account. For example, you have the following account structure:

You now need to add the "Green" account, but you want it to sort between the Yellow and Blue accounts. Instead of having to manually renumber all the accounts starting with Blue, you can use the "renumber subaccount" command on the Colors account. In the pop-up dialog the prefix value should default to "10", the account code for the colors account. If you set an interval value of 5 and click "Renumber" you will end up with the following account structure:

Now you have room in the account code numbering space to add the Green account with an account code to force the proper ordering.

Deleting an Account means removing all transaction information and information about this account from the file. This cannot be undone. You will be prompted to that you wish to remove the account. If the account still contains transaction information you will be warned that this account contains transactions.

A side effect of removing an account that contains transactions is that you will end up with unbalanced accounts. This will be indicated in the account by a gray check-box next to the debit and credit amounts. You can repair automatically these unbalanced accounts by using the Actions -> Check & Repair menu. This will automatically assign the unbalanced amounts to a new account named Imbalance.

When using the Account Register Window it is frequently useful to be able to view an account and also the transfer account at the same time. GnuCash allows you to do this quickly by using 'Jump'. This is available on the toolbar and in the Actions menu in the Account Register Window.

Select the transaction in the Account Register Window and click jump to open the transfer Account Register Window. If the transaction is split between more than one transfer account then you will need to show all the split transfer accounts first and select the transfer account to jump to.

Reconciliation of Accounts in GnuCash with statements from a bank or other institution is a way of double checking the balance of your accounts. It also is useful to track uncleared checks and other outstanding transactions.

The Summary Bar at the top of the Account Register Window indicates the amounts of Cleared and Reconciled transactions. On-line account information can be used to mark which transaction the bank has processed by changing the R (reconciliation) column in the register from n (new) to c (cleared). The bank statement is then used with the Reconcile Window to reconcile the account which changes the R field to y (reconciled).

The Reconcile Window is accessed in the Account Tree Window by going to Actions -> Reconcile... (menu shortcut Ctrl-R). In the Account Register Window it is accessed by going to Actions -> Reconcile...

Stock splits commonly occur when a company decides its stock price is to expensive for individual investors to buy the stock. Splits have the effect of lowering the price of a single share while keeping the value of shares owned by investors who have already purchased shares.