[moneydance] Help !! Please tell me I'm crazy !! or dumb or..

[Fuzzy Fox]

Katahdin <MoneyDance at intermod.net> wrote:
>
>  > You know, I have never looked closely at these.  My assumption
>  > would have been that Income accounts, because you draw money from
>  > them and store them into your accounts, should have Negative
>  > balances.
>
> I don't understand that - that logic would mean that your checking
> acct (asset) should be a neg - you draw money..

I'm not sure it's helpful to keep belaboring this, but...

Your checking account would not be negative just because you "draw
money" from it.  Well, in the case where you draw TOO MUCH money from
the account, it would indeed be negative, but in actuality your checking
account has some money in it (hopefully), that you have not yet
withdrawn or spent.  Therefore it has a positive balance.

However, where did that money come from?  Presumably it came from an
Income account, such as "Salary:Paycheck".  That Income account is a
"source" of money, and you certainly never deposit money into that
source, so it simply increases in magnitude... but is that magnitude
positive or negative?  Since your checking account goes Positive when
you deposit your paycheck, that would pedantically imply thta some other
account must go Negative.  That's what double-entry is all about, right?

But instead of following that logic, Moneydance's Income account also
increases in a positive direction, because it apparently uses some
sign-flipping logic that I assumed did not exist for any type of
account.

And now that I've discovered that Moneydance has the ability to flip the
signs around on accounts by type, it makes me wonder why this is not
done for Credit Card or Loan or Liability accounts, because most people,
I think, would expect it to work this way.

>  Since you know how MD is organized - can you tell how I pull out the
>  appropriate income & expense transaction associated with x asset or
>  liab accts?  Its sorta like filtering in - based on the 'other side'
>  of the trans being in a selected acct.

It sounds like I either do not understand what you're asking here,
or that you have answered your own question.  How do you find the
transaction on the other side?  You use "Show Other Side" which you
already mentioned.  So what is the question?

-- 
 Fuzzy Fox <fox at foxtaur.com>
  "Why a man would want a wife is a big mystery to some people.
   Why a man would want two wives is a bigamystery."