Any recommendations on turning a cash account into a regular account?
I set up several cash accounts. The cash accounts are working very well for me for accounts from which I make payments, such as checking accounts and credit card accounts. But I created a receivable account as a cash account. And it does not work so well as a cash account. Only after I entered some transactions in this cash receivable account did I realized that that cash account would work better for me as a regular account (a simple account created using Settings >> Chart of Accounts). Understand that I am not talking about a customer receivables account. It is a special receivable account between a company and a company it owns.
So, I think basically I need to create the regular account. Then, for every transaction using the old cash account, I need to (1) delete the transaction (2) enter the transaction again using the new regular account.
Firstly, I change the name of the account I that I want to replace. I name it something like “xxx old”. That makes it easy to identify in transactions. And renaming helps me not confuse it with the new regular account.
I think using find and recode does not work. That would be going to Cash Accounts and clicking on Find & Recode. But I think the cash account cannot be changed. The other account in a transaction can be changed in bulk. I want to change from the cash account to a regular account.
I’m thinking I can use the export function in the cash account to get a spreadsheet of all the transactions using the cash account. However, I see that does not tell me the other accounts in the transactions.
So, I’m just wondering if you have any recommendations for me on how to convert from cash to regular account (or from regular to cash account). I’m hoping you can suggest one or more ways to get this task done faster and hopefully with fewer mistakes.
Or, maybe it is just a task I have to go transaction by transaction.
That “Special Receivable Account” is called an Intercompany Current Account as is a regular account. In one company it will a Liability account and in the other company an Asset account.
Just make sure when you re-import the amended transactions that they don’t duplicate existing transactions
Alternatively, just edit the Special Cash Account and re-point the transaction to the new regular account.
Brucanna, you showed that you understand this receivable account. It works exactly as you described. So, it is indeed an intercompany current account. The balance of Company A’s accounts payable must be exactly equal to the balance of Company B’s accounts receivable. If the balances are not equal, something is wrong somewhere.
Turns out that the process was not nearly as bad as I feared. The export functions helped a lot because I could load the export into Excel and copy and paste a lot of the transactions I was re-entering.
So, the main difficulty was my using transfers instead of spends or receives to record transactions. A transfer is only between two cash accounts. Since I cannot transfer between a cash and non cash account. I also cannot spend or receive from another cash account. So, I had to just delete and re-enter anew all the transfer transactions, entering them as a spend or receive from a cash account. As you said, I could just edit and re-point the transaction to the new regular account–provided the transaction is a spend or receive and not a transfer.
Just so there is no mistake, I like the way the cash accounts and transfers work. The problem is my setting up an account as a cash account when I should never have set it up as a cash account. And this turned out to be a very small problem because backing out and re-entering transactions to a regular account was reasonably easy.
I think something very helpful to me in this process was making backups every time I am satisfied with a result. I backed up, made a change, and backed up again. I made a mistake here and there. But I easily got back to before I made the mistake because of backing up at every step.
Manager Accounting makes this backing up so easy because the backup button is on every page.
I like your pointing out that I am talking about an intercompany current account. I had not thought of the term. But once you pointed it out and I looked it up, I said, “Yes. It is indeed an intercompany current account”. And it is shared between the two sets of books as evidenced by the balance in Company A must always equal the balance in Company B.