Exactly so. Quicken requires double entries as well. One is the account
in which you are creating the transaction and the other is the
"category"
or
"account" for the other side. It's no different in GnuCash.
When I'm paying a credit card, I am taking money from my bank account
and paying down the credit card balance. This is the same two entries
in both GnuCash and Quicken.
I really like the idea of "a Quicken category is an account that
happens to be under Income or Expense"
On Sat, Nov 22, 2025 at 9:14 AM Paul Kroitor <[email protected]> wrote:
I really don't see it that way at all -- or at least I think about it
quite differently.
Quicken is definitely a double-entry accounting system if you think
of
categories as another name for "accounts that happen to be of the
income
or expense class".
Every Quicken transaction has one side in the register entry itself
(eg.
$25 in the Mastercard register), and then has the other side in a
category assignment (eg. $25 tools), or, in the case of a split, two
or
more category assignments ($15 tools, $10 paint). Just like Gnucash,
if
it doesn't balance, a balancing entry is automatically created
(against
"Imbalance" in Gnucash, "Uncategorized" in Quicken), but the total of
the transaction has to equal zero in both apps.
It's doing the same thing, just presenting it differently to the
user.
Also, Gnucash makes it more obvious that one's books as a whole are
out
of balance when one has this glaring non-zero Imbalance account.
Paul
On 2025-11-22 9:41 a.m., Kalpesh Patel wrote:
"... one can make transactions between two Income accounts, or
Income vs
Expense, neither of which is (directly) possible in Quicken." -- this
was
possible if you had created an account for everything and then
selecting
category that started with '[' (which showed up in the Transfers
category
in the dropdown) during transaction entry in Quicken (it was also the
last
icon with one that showed a line splitting into two arrows in the
transaction entry line). But creating account for everything isn't
the norm
in Quicken for ease of use ...
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Kroitor <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2025 10:36 PM
To: R Losey <[email protected]>
Cc: Larry Weeks <[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [GNC] Coming from Quicken
The way I look at it is this:
Gnucash, like the rest of the (formal) accounting universe, has
five
types of accounts:
- assets
- liabilities
- income
-expense
- equity
Together, these are combined to create the “accounting equation”,
and
each of these is (almost) always sub-divided into sub-accounts.
Quicken maintains these first two of these as accounts (and
sub-accounts), but calls the third and fourth “categories” (and
sub-categories). The last type (equity) is not formally maintained in
Quicken but is calculated on the fly (as “net worth”) using the other
four
and the accounting equation.
My belief is that Quicken was designed this way to be more
user-friendly
for people with little understanding of accounting. Certainly Gnucash
is
simpler and more elegant in concept. For one thing, one can make
transactions between two Income accounts, or Income vs Expense,
neither of
which is (directly) possible in Quicken.
Paul
On Nov 21, 2025, at 10:11 PM, R Losey <[email protected]> wrote:
Tutorial/Document: I'm not aware of anything on the official
GnuCash
websites, but you may do a general search and find something on
YouTube or something.
Account vs Categories: I may get a lot of hate follow-ups for
this,
but this difference is more in philosophy and naming than in
actual
practice.
Everything in GnuCash is an account; in Quicken, "accounts" are
thing
that hold actual money, such as checking, saving, CDs, or
investments.
On the other hand, "categories" are kind of "ideas" to track where
the
money goes.
This may not be the best distinction; perhaps someone else could
describe it better.
Moving Transactions: There are a couple of simple ways to correct
bad
data
entry: You can go to the transaction and edit it and change the
wrong
account to the right account. You could, if you prefer, just
delete
the bad transaction and re-enter it.
I went from Quicken to GnuCash a few years ago.
On Fri, Nov 21, 2025 at 2:15 PM Larry Weeks
<[email protected]>
wrote:
Is there a tutorial or document that walks through how Gnucash is
different from Quicken, accounts versus categories, how to move
transactions from account to account if they were categorized
wrong,
etc?
--
3 John 1:4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children
are
walking in the truth.
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