Account

An account in GreenBooks mirrors an account you have in real life. For example, checking account, credit card, cash, investment account, asset, loan or cash in your wallet. Anything that carries monetary value can be tracked inside GreenBooks.

You can add all of your accounts into GreenBooks to track your total net worth, or track only a subset of your accounts. The choice is yours.

Add an Account

To add an account in GreenBooks, just press the + button. On the Mac the + button is located on the lower left corner of the window. On iPhone, it’s on the upper left corner of the Accounts view.

When you add an account, you will be presented with the following view:

On the iPhone the form looks a little different, but is has the same fields.

• Name: Name of the account. Keep it short.
• Currency: Your account can be in any currency.
• Start Balance: The current balance of this account.

There is also the Type field. There are several to choose from:

• Checking, GreenBooks, Credit Card: Use these as their names suggest.
• Cash: Cash is a little different from all the other account types in that the transactions you enter are automatically cleared, in all other account types, new transactions are pending by default. What this means is explained in the Reconciliation section.
• Other: For all other types of account, such as PayPal, loan, investment… use the Other account type.

💡 What about double-entry bookkeeping?

GreenBooks is not just a great money manager for household finances, it is also a great manager for business finanaces.

Many of our users use GreenBooks for business and it works even better than traditional “double-entry” accounting system like QuickBooks, because it’s more intuitive to use.

It’s important to keep in mind that GreenBooks is what’s known as “single-entry” accounting, which is drastically simpler than double-entry.

There is just one difference in terminology I want to point out regarding this. In double-entry, an account is not a money account like your credit card, but corresponds to a category in GreenBooks. That is the only difference you need to know.

If you would like to learn more about how GreenBooks can help your business, send us an email.