Lesson 31-- Accounts

This lesson covers Goldenseal Accounts. Goldenseal accounting software uses accounts for customers, employees, bank accounts, and other "real world" people, businesses and financial entities.

NOTE-- For intangible items like Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, Goldenseal uses Utility Accounts. For tracking expenses, you don't need accounts at all since you can use Cost Categories or Cost Locations.

There are four basic types of accounts--Jobs (described here), Assets, Liabilities and Costs.

Job Accounts

Job accounts consume expenses, and generate income (either directly or indirectly). When you track job costs, you'll assign every expense to a job account.

There are three classes of job accounts:

  • Customers-- Use Customer accounts for people or businesses that give you money for the goods or services that you provide to them. They were described more fully in Lesson Nine.
  • Overhead accounts-- Use Overhead accounts to allocate your cost of doing business. Overhead accounts handle any expenses that can't be assigned to a specific customer or project.
  • Projects-- Use Project accounts for pieces of work that you do for a customer, or as part of your overhead. They were described more fully in Lesson Nine

Overhead Accounts

Use Overhead accounts to track expenses that you can't assign to a specific customer or project.

You only need one overhead account, but you can create more if you'd like to track different types of overhead separately.

To create a new overhead account, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Overhead from the Accounts menu.
  2. You'll see a browser window.
  3. Click the New button.
  4. Enter a short account name.
  5. If you'd like to track overhead expenses against a budget, enter an estimate into the Job Cost Budget field.
  6. Fill in the other fields (see the Reference Manual for details, or look at the help messages in the left side of the window).

Using Overhead Accounts

When you enter expenses that you can't assign to a specific customer or project, enter an overhead account into the Job field.

When you do large projects for use by your own company, create a Project account and assign it to an overhead account.

Next-- Asset Accounts

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