I am struggling with the same thing myself. From what I can tell, the double entry thing means that for EACH transaction you have to make sure you do two things. Like if you take money out of an ATM machine that is 1 reducing ATM savings or whatever it came from 2. crediting 'loose cash' or whatever you wanna call it. I think I am going to have to really work to do this right, but it makes a lot of sense in the bigger picture, as long as it isn't too hard to work with. It forces you to think like an accountant about it in terms of where to put money and where it came from (ie what to reduce or increase). My guess is that you need to add something to whatever balances out your Donations entry. IOW the 100 bucks didn't come out of the sky or grow on trees, you have to account not only for balances but where the money comes from. Sounds to me like you need something along the lines of a 'Donations Source' account. Maybe you can create that account, use it for balancing purposes only, and basically ignore it otherwise. Cheers Marc <div>On 9/23/05, Robert Bell <<a href="mailto:robert@thebellfamily.com">robert@thebellfamily.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> OK, I just don't get gnucash. I want to track a simple cash account for my group of Cub Scouts. I am only used to Quicken so I haven't done any double entry accounting before. My understanding is that I need an income and and an expense account? I really have two sources of income donations and fund raising. I created 3 accounts Donations, Fund raising and Expenses. Is this the correct way? So I added an entry to Donations, $100 for example and it tells me the transaction is not balanced. What does that mean, there has to be someplace I can record income without requiring that it come from another account right? I'm sure I'm missing some basic idea here. Thanks robert -- fedora-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-list@redhat.com">fedora-list@redhat.com</a> To unsubscribe: <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list</a> </blockquote> </div>