How do I account for 100 percent vendor discounts in GnuCash 2.6.5
I am no expert on the situation nor do I pretend to act like one, but, as a business owner, allow me to give you my personal opinion. Option 3 is closest to what you want. Why? Well: This way, you have both the record of everything that was done, and also IRS can see exactly what happened. Another suggestion would be to ask the GnuCash maintainers and community directly. You can have a chat with them on their IRC channel #gnucash, send them an email, maybe find the answer in the documentation or wiki. Popular software apps usually have both support people and a helpful community, so if the above method is in any way inconvenient for you, you can give this one a try. Hope this helps! Robert "The answer was provided to me at the Gnucash chat by ""warlord"". The procedure is as follows: After doing this you will have:"
The best thing for you to do will be to start using the Cash Flow report instead of the Income and Expense report. Go to Reports -> Income and Expense -> Cash Flow Once the report is open, open the edit window and open the Accounts tab.  There, choose your various cash accounts (checking, saving, etc.).  In the General tab, choose the reporting period.  (And then save the report settings so you don't need to go hunting for your cash accounts each time.) GnuCash will display for you all the inflows and outflows of money, which appears to be what you really want. Though GnuCash doesn't present the Cash Flow in a way that matches United States accounting rules (with sections for operating, investing, and financial cash flows separated), it is certainly fine for your personal use. If you want the total payment to show up as one line on the Cash Flow report, you will need to book the accrual of interest and the payment to the mortgage bank as two separate entries. Normal entry for mortgage payments (which shows up as a line for mortgage and a line for interest on your Cash Flow): Pair of entries to make full mortgage payment show up as one line on Cash Flow: Entry #1:  Interest accrual Entry #2:  Full mortgage payment (Tested in GnuCash 2.6.1) "I found an answer by Peter Selinger, in two articles, Tutorial on multiple currency accounting (June 2005, Jan 2011) and the accompanying Multiple currency accounting in GnuCash (June 2005, Feb 2007). Selinger embraces the currency neutrality I'm after. His method uses ""[a]n account that is denominated as a difference of multiple currencies... known as a currency trading account."" Currency trading accounts show the gain or loss based on exchange rates at any moment.  Apparently GnuCash 2.3.9 added support for multi-currency accounting. I haven't tried this myself. This feature is not enabled by default, and must be turned on explicity. To do so, check ""Use Trading Accounts"" under File -> Properties -> Accounts. This must be done on a per-file basis. Thanks to Mike Alexander, who implemented this feature in 2007, and worked for over 3 years to convince the GnuCash developers to include it. Older versions of GnuCash, such as 1.8.11, apparently had a feature called ""Currency Trading Accounts"", but they behaved differently than Selinger's method." There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account. "Uh, have you tried google docs? Start off simple. Other than that, for the moment I use GNUCash. Some day I might try to write my own, but for now it works well enough. I have a number of scheduled transactions in GNUCash, and it records them days in advance. You talk about ""I should have how much money"", but GNUCash offers a slightly better format: Future Minimum Balance. If you want to know whether you can spend money in an account without triggering a chain reaction, that's the number you want. Being web-based so that it can be accessed from any OS. GNUCash is cross platform, with Windows, OSX and Linux clients. It also supports mysql/postgres database backends, so while it's not ""Web based"", you can keep your data ""in the cloud""." The initial position is worth 40000. You post 50% margin, so you deposited 20000 and borrowed 20000. 6% of 20000 is 1200. "You are confining the way you and the other co-founders are paid for guaranteeing the loan to capital shares. Trying to determine payments by equity distribution is hard. It is a practice that many small companies particularly the ones in their initial stage fall into. I always advise against trying to make payments with equity, weather it is for unpaid salary or for guaranteeing a loan such as your case. Instead of thinking about a super sophisticated algorithm to distribute the new shares between the cofounders and the new investors, given a set of constraints, which will most probably fail to make the satisfactory split, you should simply view the co-founders as debt lenders for the company and the shareholders as a capital contributor.  If the co-founders are treated as debt lenders, it will be much easier to determine the risk compensation for guaranteeing the loan because it is now assessed in monetary units and this compensation is equal to the risk premium you see fit ""taking into consideration the probability of default "". On the other hand, capital contributors will gain capital shares as a percentage of the total value of the company after adding SBA loan." Thanks for the info! It seems the consolidation option is the best; switching to the new merchant services provider and getting the discount from our POS on gift card software  Can you give me a but more info about the customer loyalty/marketing info? If you don't track the accrued costs involved, then it means that the valuation of the deal will be somewhat arbitrary, but it still can be made by looking at the value of equivalent or similar goods or services. It's rather similar to accounting treatment of (noncash) gifts, for example. You make up a valuation, and as there are obvious tax reasons to make it as low as possible, the valuation should be justifiable or you risk the wrath of IRS. If you sell the same goods or services for cash, then the value of the barter deal is obvious. If this barter is the only time you're handling this particular type of goods, a wholesale price of similar items (either of your items, or the items that you're receiving in barter) could work.