Entering your charges provides you with a more complete picture of your spending habits. Charges on a credit card are tracked as a transaction between the credit card liability account and the appropriate expense account.

When you pay for goods or services with your credit card, you are telling the credit card company to pay the merchant for you. This transaction will increase the amount of money you owe the credit card company, and the credit card balance will increase. The other side of these transactions will in most cases be an expense account. For example, if you buy clothing from a store with your credit card for $50, you would be transferring that money from the credit account into Expenses:Clothing.

Entering these transactions into GnuCash allows you to track how much you owe the credit card company, as well as provides you a better picture of your overall accounts. It also allows you to monitor your account and ensure that fraud is avoided.

Adding transactions to a credit card account is similar to entering transactions in other accounts. You can enter them manually, or import them from your credit card company using a compatible import format.

For assistance with entering transactions, see Chapter 6 of the Help manual and Section 2.9, “Transactions”.