Personal Banking using accrual method
"You would add your daily earnings every day. For example, you work full time job (8 hours a day) at $20/hour. At the end of the 1st day of the month, you'd add $160 to your salary account. You've earned it, even though its still almost a month till you actually get paid. So its accrued. What if you don't get paid? You've accrued it already, its on your books, but not in your wallet. You might have paid taxes on it, etc. But you don't really have it. This is what is called ""bad debt"", and eventually, after you can show that the payee is not going to pay, you write it off - remove it from your books (and adjust your taxes etc that you paid on that income already). Generally, it is a very bad idea to use accrual method of accounting for an individual or a small business. For large volume business using accrual mode solves other accounting and revenue recognition problems."
Funds earned and spent before opening a dedicated business account should be classified according to their origination. For example, if your business received income, where did that money go?  If you took the money personally, it would be considered either a 'distribution' or a 'loan' to you.  It is up to you which of the two options you choose. On the flip side, if your business had an expense that you paid personally, that would be considered either a 'contribution of capital' or a 'loan' from you. If you choose to record these transactions as loans, you can offset them together, so you don't need two separate accounts, loan to you and loan from you. When the bank account was opened, the initial deposit came from where?  If it came from your personal funds, then it is either a 'contribution of capital' or a 'loan' from you. From the sound of your question, you deposited what remained after the preceding income/expenses.  This would, in effect, return the 'loan' account back to zero, if choosing that route. The above would also be how to record any expenses you may pay personally for the business (if any) in the future. Because these transactions were not through a dedicated business bank account, you can't record them in Quickbooks as checks and deposits.  Instead, you can use Journal Entries.  For any income received, you would debit your capital/loan account and credit your income account.  For any expenses, you would debit the appropriate expense account and credit your distribution/loan account. Also, if setting up a loan account, you should choose either Current Asset or Current Liability type.  The capital contribution and distribution account should be Equity type. Hope this helps! "An accounting general ledger is based on tracking your actual assets, liabilities, expenses, and income, and Gnucash is first and foremost a general ledger program. While it has some simple ""budgeting"" capabilities, they're primarily based around reporting how close your actual expenses were to a planned budget, not around forecasting eventual cash flow or ""saving"" a portion of assets for particular purposes. I think the closest concept to what you're trying to do is that you want to take your ""real"" Checking account, and segment it into portions. You could use something like this as an Account Hierarchy: The total in the ""Checking Account"" parent represents your actual amount of money that you might reconcile with your bank, but you have it allocated in your accounting in various ways. You may have deposits usually go into the ""Available funds"" subaccount, but when you want to save some money you transfer from that into a Savings subaccount. You could include that transfer as an additional split when you buy something, such as transferring $50 from Assets:Checking Account:Available Funds sending $45 to Expenses:Groceries and $5 to Assets:Checking Account:Long-term Savings. This can make it a little more annoying to reconcile your accounts (you need to use the ""Include Subaccounts"" checkbox), and I'm not sure how well it'd work if you ever imported transaction files from your bank. Another option may be to track your budgeting (which answers ""How much am I allowed to spend on X right now?"") separately from your accounting (which only answers ""How much have I spent on X in the past?"" and ""How much do I own right now?""), using a different application or spreadsheet. Using Gnucash to track ""budget envelopes"" is kind of twisting it in a way it's not really designed for, though it may work well enough for what you're looking for." Almost every company I know of charges something like 2% per month on past due accounts.  They are not financial institutions, so it's probably quite legal. I work at a large bank, that isn't too unusual although a lot of banks are moving to fee-free basic accounts and upping their fees on other specific transactions. For example, my bank did away with minimum balance requirements to waive a monthly service fee, but we started charging $2/month for paper statements and upped our out-of-network ATM fee by 50 cents.  Would like to point out that most financial institutions will reorder your transactions slightly for the purposes of accounting. It is much easier to run all transactions in big batches at the end of the day than individually as they come in. Required disclosures you receive upon account opening explain the exact order but most banks do all credits (money in) first and then debits (money out) like checks, debit cards, and ACH payments after. If you overdraft you can usually avoid a fee if you make a cash deposit before the end of the business day as the cash will go into your account before your purchases are debited.  OCCASIONALLY this accounting-based reordering will result in additional fees but that is not the intended purpose of reordering them. And I would always refund any incurred fees that happened due to accounting-based transaction reordering.   What Wells Fargo is doing has been illegal since 2008 and their continued appeals are hoping to get the ruling overturned so they won't have to pay out restitution to affected customers. It's frankly despicable. PocketSmith is another tool you might like to consider. No personal banking details are required, but you can upload your transactions in a variety of formats. Pocketsmith is interesting because it really focus on your future cash flow, and the main feature of the interface is around having a calendar(s) where you easily enter one off or repetitive expenses/income. http://www.pocketsmith.com/ Mint.com does a pretty good job at this, for a free service, but it's mostly for personal finance. It looks at all of your transactions and tries to categorize them, and also allows you to create your own categories and filters. For example, when I started using it, it imported the last three months of my transactions and detected all of my 'coffee house' transactions. This is how I learned that I was spending about $90 a month going to Starbucks, rather than the $30 I had estimated.  I know it's not a 'system' like an accounting outfit might use, but most accounting offices I've worked with have had their own home-brewed system. Most likely your accounting is cash basis, not accrual, so it's pretty tough to do unless you resort to the dodgy methods discussed so often by the tax avoidance enthusiasts.  There is a difference between a CPA service and a tax lawyer, perhaps you need to know one of the latter. "Unfortunately I don't think any of the online personal finance applications will do what you're asking. Most (if not all) online person finance software uses a combination of partnerships with the banks themselves and ""screen scraping"" to import your data. This simplifies things for the user but is typically limited to whenever the service was activated. Online personal finance software is still relatively young and doesn't offer the depth available in a desktop application (yet). If you are unwilling to part with historical data you spent years accumulating you are better off with a desktop application. Online Personal Finance Software Pros Cons Desktop Personal Finance Software Pros Cons In my humble opinion the personal finance software industry really needs a hybrid approach. A desktop application that is synchronized with a website. Offering the stability and tools of a desktop application with the availability of a web application." If annualized rate of return is what you are looking for, using a tool would make it a lot easier.   In the post I've also explained how to use the spreadsheet.   Hope this helps. You could create your own spreadsheet of Cash Flows and use the XIRR function in Excel: The formula is: There is a lot of depth that can go into this.  Depends on how far you want to take this.  Think u have the right idea...  people who go the extra step get promoted.  If prior reporting was very simple, u can build on it over time.   I suggest starting with some Known Performance Indicators / KPIs since mgmt can understand those easier than detailed analysis.   You can start with identifying metrics that matter.  Probably total assets, avg account bal, average customer bal, avg # of accounts per customer, new deposits/withdrawal both gross and avg per account/customer, new/closed accounts.   Once metrics are picked gather monthly (or whatever time period) and monitor/review month over month/year over year.    PM if u want to discuss more.  I have experience in data analytics. "I use the (gratis, libre) command-line program ledger for my personal accounts.  It handles funds across accounts gracefully, through a feature called ""Virtual Accounts"".  A transaction can add or subtract money from a virtual account, which need not balance with all the other entries in the transaction.  Then it's just a matter of setting up reports to include or exclude these accounts." "If you are using software like QuickBooks (or even just using spreadsheets or tracking this without software) use two Equity accounts, something like ""Capital Contributions"" and ""Capital Distributions"" When you write a personal check to the company, the money goes into the company's checking account and also increases the Capital Contribution account in accordance with double-entry accounting practices. When the company has enough retained earnings to pay you back, you use the Capital Distributions equity account and just write yourself a check. You can also make general journal entries every year to zero out or balance your two capital accounts with Retained Earnings, which (I think) is an automatically generated Equity account in QuickBooks. If this sounds too complex, you could also just use a single ""Capital Contributions and Distributions"" equity account for your contributions and distributions." From my experience, I opened a business account to handle my LLC which owns a rental property. The account process and features were similar to shopping for a personal checking account.  There would be fees for falling below a minimum balance, and for wanting a paper statement. In my case, keeping $2000 avoids the fee, and I pull the statements online and save the PDFs. Once open for a certain amount of time, you might be able to get credit extended based on the money that flows through that account. The online access is similar to my personal checking, as is the sending of payments electronically. If you can live with managing the individual category amounts yourself, this is trivial. Just set up a spreadsheet listing each category (and a column for the total amount of money in the account), adding or subtracting as you deposit or withdraw money to the account. To the bank it will be just one (physical) account, but to you, it can be any number of (accounting asset) accounts. You can choose to keep a history, or not. It's all up to how complex you want to make it. It doesn't even have to be a spreadsheet - you can just as well do this on paper if you prefer that. But the computer makes it easier. I imagine most personal finance software will help you, too; I know GnuCash can be coaxed into doing this with only a bit of creativity, and it almost certainly isn't the only one. I do this myself and it works very well. I don't know but imagine that companies do it all the time: there is no reason why there must be a one-to-one relationship between bank accounts and accounting asset accounts, and in fact, doing so would probably quickly become impractical.