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

[Tjalco P. van der Meij]

Greetings,

The problem about all this is that it is not really helpful to 
substitute Positive and Negative for Debit and Credit.
If you work with a double entry bookkeeping system the accounts are 
divided in to 4 categories:\
Assets                       Debit balance
Liabilities                  Credit balance
Income                       Credit balance
expenditure               Debit balance

Computers prefer to work with positive and negative so a raw computer 
trial balance (list of all balances) shows all debit balances as 
positive and all credit balances as negative. This confuses a lot of non 
bookkeepers because it is hard to imagine income as negative and 
expenditure as positive.
Moneydance confuses the issue even more by talking about "increase" and 
"decrease".
The main problem remains that if you want to understand the basics of 
bookkeeping you will have to understand the difference between a debit 
and a credit and this is unfortunately probably the most difficult 
concept of bookkeeping.
In Moneydance however you can make entries without understanding them 
and just trust the results.
This avoids having sleepless nights.


-- 
Regards,
Tjalco P. van der Meij
presently at:
"Vasarnamis"
Le Galame, 
Les Castilloux de Nantheuil
24800
France
+33-5-53524218