vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Ditto Nate Eldredge in many ways, but let me add some other thoughts. BTW there are not four types of account, but five. You're forgetting equity, also called capital. Would it be possible to design an accounting system that does not have 5 types of accounts, maybe is simpler in other ways, and is internally consistent and logical? I'm sure it is. But what's the advantage? As Nate points out, the existing system has been in use for hundreds of years. Lots of people know how it works and understand it. I'd add: People have long since worked out how to deal with all the common situations and 99% of the odd cases you're likely to hit. If you invent your own system, you're starting from scratch. You'd have to come up with conventions to handle all sorts of situations. How do I record buying a consumable with cash? How do I record buying a capital asset with credit? How do I record paying off debts? How do I record depreciation? Etc etc. If you worked at it long and hard enough and you're a reasonably bright guy, maybe you could come up with solutions to all the problems. But why? If you were approaching this saying, ""I see these flaws in the way accounting is done today. I have an idea for a new, better way to do accounting"", I'd say good luck, you have a lot of work ahead of you working out all the details to make a fully functioning system, and then persuading others to use it, but if you really do have a better idea, maybe you can revolutionize the world of accounting. But, ""The present system is too much trouble and I don't want to bother to learn it"" ... I think that's a mistake. The work involved in inventing your own system is going to end up being way more than what it would take to learn the existing system. As to, Aren't liabilities a lot like assets? Well, in a sense I suppose. A credit card is like a checking account in that you can use it to pay for things.
The GnuCash tutorial has some basics on double entry accounting:  http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v1.8/C/gnucash-guide/basics_accounting1.html#basics_accountingdouble2
You can apply for Foreign currency accounts. But they aren't saving accounts by any means, but more like current accounts. Taking money out will involve charges. You have to visit the bank website to figure out what all operations can be performed on your account. Barclays and HSBC allow accounts in foreign currency. Other banks also will be providing the same services. Are there banks where you can open a bank account without being a citizen of that country without having to visit the bank in person Depends on country by country.  Are there any online services for investing money that aren't tied to any particular country? Get yourself a trading account and invest in foreign markets i.e. equities, bonds etc.  But all in all be ready for the foreign exchange risks involved in denominating assets in multiple currencies.
"As a person who has had several part time assistants in the past I will offer you a simple piece of advise that should apply regardless of what country the assistant is located. If you have an assistant, personal or business, virtual or otherwise, and you don't trust that person with this type of information, get a different assistant.  An assistant is someone who is supposed to make your life easier by off loading work. Modifying your records before sending them every month sounds like you are creating more work for yourself not less. Either take the leap of faith to trust your assistant or go somewhere else.  An assistant that you feel you have to edit crucial information from is less than useful. That being said, there is no fundamental reason to believe that an operation in the Philippines or anywhere else is any more or less trustworthy than an operation in your native country. However, what is at issue is the legal framework around your relationship and in particular your recourse if something goes wrong.  If you and your virtual assistant are both located in the US you would have an easier time collecting damages should something go wrong.  I suggest you evaluate your level of comfort for risk vs. cost.  If you feel that the risk is too high to use an overseas service versus the savings, then find someone in the states to do this work.  Depending on your needs and comfort you might want to seek out a CPA or other licensed/bonded professional.  Yes the cost might be higher however you might find that it is worth it for your own piece of mind. As a side note you might even consider finding a local part-time assistant. This can often be more useful than a virtual assistant and may not cost as much as you think. If you can live without someone being bonded.  (or are willing to pay for the bonding fee) yourself,  depending on your market and needs you may be able to find an existing highly qualified EA or other person that wants some after hours work.   If you are in a college town, finance, accounting or legal majors make great assistants.  They will usually work a couple hours a week for ""beer money"", they have flexible schedules and are glad to have something pertinent to their degree to put on their resume when they graduate.  Just be prepared to replace them every few years as they move on to real jobs."
"Bookkeeping and double-entry accounting is really designed for tracking the finances of a single entity. It sounds like you're trying to use it to keep multiple entities' information, which may somewhat work but isn't really going to be the easiest to understand. Here's a few approaches: In this approach, the books are entirely from your perspective. So, if you're holding onto money that ""really"" belongs to your kids, then what you've done is you're taking a loan from them. This means that you should record it as a liability on your books. If you received $300, of which $100 was actually yours, $100 belongs to Kid #1 (and thus is a loan from him), and $100 belongs to Kid #2 (and thus is a loan from her), you'd record it just that way. Note that you only received $100 of income, since that's the only money that's ""yours"", and the other $200 you're only holding on behalf of your kids. When you give the money to your kids or spend it on their behalf, then you debit the liability accordingly and credit the Petty Cash or other account you spent it from. If you wanted to do this in excruciating detail, then your kids could each have their own set of books, in which they would see a transfer from their own Income:Garage Sale account into their Assets:Held by Parents account. For this, you just apportion each of your asset accounts into subaccounts tracking how much money each of you has in it. This lets you treat the whole family as one single entity, sharing in the income, expenses, etc. It lets you see the whole pool of money as being the family's, but also lets you track internally some value of assets for each person. Whenever you spend money you need to record which subaccount it came from, and it could be more challenging if you actually need to record income or expenses separately per person (for some sort of tax reasons, say) unless you also break up each Income and Expense account per person as well. (In which case, it may be easier just to have each person keep their entirely separate set of books.)
You must keep good record of ALL your income. This is especially important when you have money coming in from various sources (a payroll, gifts from friends, business income from clients and/or the App Stores, etc.) Do not just assume that copies of your bank deposits tell the whole story. Bank statements might tell you the amount and date of a deposit, but you don't really know ""where"" that money came from unless you are tracking it! The good news is that the above record keeping can be quite easy with something like Quicken or QuickBooks (or many many other such popular programs.) You will want to ensure you have the needed licenses (not necessarily required at all for a lot of small businesses, especially home based businesses.) Depending on your business activity, you might want to consider business liability insurance. Again, this will depend on your clients and/or other business entities you'll be dealing with. Some might require you to have some insurance. Will be efforts even be considered a business initially until some amount of money actually starts coming in? This might be a legal / accountant question as to the very specific answer from the POV of the law and taxing authorities. However, consider that not all businesses make any money at all, for a long time, and they definitely ""are a business"". For instance, Twitter was losing money for a long time (years) and no one would argue they were not a business. Again, deferring to the attorneys/cpas here for the legal answer, the practical answer is that you're performing ""some"" business activity when you start creating a product and working hard to make it happen! I would consider ""acting as"" a business regardless! What things do I need to do up-front and what things can I defer to later, especially in light of the fact that it might be several months to a couple years before any substantial income starts coming in? This question's answer could be quite long. There are potentially many items you can defer. However, one I can say is that you might consider deferring incorporation. An individual can perform a business activity and draw income from it legally in a lot of situations.
If I were you, I would pay one of them off completely, then cut the card up and close the account. I have the feeling that you would be better off with just one card. That's all I've ever had and I've never needed a second one. It can help keep you out of trouble, too. Then I'd apply $1000 to $1500 towards the other card, and blow the rest on something stupid. Win-win.
My wife and I do this. We have one account for income and one for expenditures (and around 7 others for dedicated savings.) Doing this we are forcing ourselves to keep track of all expenditures as we have to manually transfer funds from one to the other, we try to do this periodically (every Wednesday) and then keep the expenditures within what is actually on the account. It is a really good way to keep track of everything. Bear in mind that our bank provides a fast handy smartphone app where we both can check our account as well as transfer funds in less than 10 seconds. (Fingerprint authentication, instant funds transfer as well as zero fees for transfers.) Right now we have a credit card each attached to the expenditures account, but earlier we only had a debit card each and no credit cards. Meaning that when the weekly funds ran out we where simply not able to pay. We did this to mimic living only on cash and when the cash runs out you simply have to stop buying stuff. And at the same time we could accrue quite a bit of savings. I would definitely recommend this if you have problems with over expenditures.
You could conceivably open a few accounts.  For example, a bank account and a credit card account.  Then the accounts will be older when evaluated for credit when you return.  This would look better than opening fresh accounts later.  But don't expect a big difference in score.  And you'll be stuck with those accounts in the future, otherwise you lose the benefit.  I wouldn't worry about maintaining balances now.  You can wait until you come back.  Occasional purchases may be helpful.   What they really want to see is a regular and sustained use of accounts without missing payments or overextending.  But if you're not going to be here, you can't really do that.  Note that good credit scores are based on seven years of data, preferably a lot of it.  Opening a few accounts can't substitute for that, even if you put balances on them.   If you're not here, you won't be paying rent or utilities.  You won't have a proven payment history on the most common accounts.   If money were no object, you could do something like purchase a house or condo that you could rent out, utilities included.  That would build up a payment history.  But if money were no object, you probably wouldn't be worried about your credit score.  It's more practical to just live normally and be sure that you always live within your means so that you don't experience negative credit events.   You might think about why you want a good credit score.  Is it to borrow a lot of money?  You might be able to spend money to achieve that.  Is it to save money on future borrowing?  If it costs money now, how much will you save total?   Opening accounts now that you won't really use until you return is about the only thing that you can do that won't cost you money.  Perhaps put a balance on the bank account--at least you'll get that money back some day.  Maintaining a balance on the credit cards would cost you money in interest charges, and you don't really benefit from an improved credit score until you use your credit.  So the interest fees aren't really buying you anything.
The SWIFT format has multiple place holders. The Beneficiary Bank and Account can be specified using Local Sort Codes [ABA number in this example]. However you would still need to specify the Correspondent Bank and its BIC.
Restricting the discussion only to Internet hacking:   In Option 2 or Option 3, you have to realize that the funds are credited to a specific Registered Bank Account. So the max damage an hacker can do is liquidate your holding. In Option 2, the Banking Internet Login and the Broker Internet Login will be different, For example HDFC Bank and HDFC Securities. In Option 3, if you choose your Bank, then it will be the same Login. If you choose a Non-Bank as provider then there is a different login. The risk is no different to investing in shares. In the end its up to an individual, there is nothing that stops you from opening multiple accounts in option 2 and option 3 and buying the stocks worth particular value. From an overall risk point of view; Option 2 seems best suited as the units are held in a Demat from by a Depository.
If you can provide evidence that you are the person who opened the account (which may be as simple as providing your signature, since this isn't really different from asking for a bank check or inter-bank transfer or ATM-network transfer), there should be no problem. Contact your bank and ask them what information they need to provide.
There is no law that requires you to have a separate bank account for your business, or to pay all expenses from a business bank account. It is a GOOD IDEA to have a separate bank account and pay all business expenses from that account and all personal expenses from your personal account, because that makes sorting out what is what much simpler, both in case of an audit and for your own accounting. Whether a particular expenditure is a deductible business expense has nothing to do with what account you pay it from. If you pay advertising expenses for your business from your personal account, that's still (almost certainly) a deductible business expense. If you buy groceries from your business account, that's almost certainly not a deductible business expense. In your case, there are all kinds of rules about when and how much travel is deductible.
"From the banks point of view the point of a current account like this is to get you as a regular customer. They want to be your ""main bank"", the bank you interact with the most, the bank you turn to first when you need financial products and services, the bank whose advertising you see every time you log into online banking or walk into a branch. The bank knows that if they just offer the unprofitablly high interest rate or other perks with no strings attatched that people will open the account and dump a bunch of savings in it but won't actually move their financial life over, their old bank will still be their main bank. So they attatch strings like a required minimum deposit, a minimum number of direct debits and similar. These have minimal effect on people actually using the account as their main current account while being a pain for people trying to game the system. Of course as you point out it is still possible to game the system but they don't need to make gaming the system impossible, they just need to make it inconvianiant enough that most people won't bother."
"Here are some things you want to look at for evaluating a bank or credit union for your regular spending accounts: Convenience.  Do they have a branch in a convenient location for you?  Do they have no-fee ATMs near you? Website.  If you are like me, you will spend more time on the bank's website than you do inside a branch.  Some bank's websites are great, some are terrible.  Unfortunately, this is generally difficult to evaluate until you actually get an account.  You want a website that is easy to use.  It should allow you to easily move money between your accounts, get instant lists of transactions, show you your monthly statements, and have a billpay feature that works well.  If you use budgeting software that interfaces online with your bank, you want to ensure that it works well with your bank. Fee structure.  Some banks will nickel-and-dime you to death.  Watch out for minimum balance fees and ATM fees.  Banks and credit unions usually have a fee schedule page on their website that lists every fee they charge, making it easy to compare different banks.   I would not be very concerned about interest rates for savings.  Currently, all savings accounts have a universally terrible interest rate.  Therefore, I wouldn't base my bank choice on the interest rate.  Sure, one might offer double the interest rate of another, but double ""next-to-nothing"" is still ""next-to-nothing.""  When you accumulate enough savings that you want to start maximizing your earnings, you can look for a better rate at another bank to move your savings to, and you can keep your checking account at the bank with the best convenience and fee structure. In my limited experience, I have had better luck with credit unions than with banks when it comes to fees."
Your last sentence is key. If you have multiple accounts, it's too easy to lose track over the years. I've seen too many people pass on and the spouse has a tough time tracking the accounts, often finding a prior spouse listed as beneficiary.  In this case, your gut is right, simpler is better.
But, ""The present system is too much trouble and I don't want to bother to learn it"" ... I think that's a mistake. The work involved in inventing your own system is going to end up being way more than what it would take to learn the existing system. As to, Aren't liabilities a lot like assets? Well, in a sense I suppose. A credit card is like a checking account in that you can use it to pay for things. But they're very different, too. From an accounting point of view, with a checking account you buy something and then the money is gone, so there's one transaction: reduce cash and increase office supplies or whatever. But with a credit card there has to be a second transaction, when you pay off the charge: So, step 1, increase debt and increase office supplies; step 2, decrease debt and decrease cash. Credit cards charge interest, well you don't pay interest to use your own cash. Etc. One of the beauties of double-entry book-keeping is that every transaction involves a debit and a credit of equal amounts (or a set of debits and credits where the total of the debits equals the total of the credits). If you combine assets and liabilities into, whatever you call it, ""balance accounts"" say, then some transactions would involve a matching debit and credit while others would involve a positive debit and a matching negative debit and no credit. I'm sure you could make such a system work, but one of the neat built-in protections against error is lost. There's a very logical distinction between things that you have or that others owe you, and things that you owe to others. It makes a lot of sense to want to list them separately and manage them separately. I think you'd pretty quickly find yourself saying, ""well, we have two types of balance accounts, those that represent things we have and which normally have positive balances, which we list on chart A, and those that represent things we owe and which normally have negative balances, which we list on chart B"". And before you know it you've just reinvented assets and liabilities."
The security concept of minimising attack surface could be stretched to apply here, especially if closing the account would mean the end of your relationship with that bank.  Essentially more routes into your finances or personal information means more opportunities for fraud, more accounts to keep an eye on, more logins to remember/store, and even more paperwork/idle cards to check (for unexpected activity and T&C changes), store and eventually shred.  However I had a couple of online-only savings accounts with zero balance for a few years, at a bank where I have other accounts, and I didn;t worry in the slightest.  (You can open the accounts online but have to phone to close them and sitting on hold is too much of a chore for me. Eventually they realised their mistake, brought in a minimum balance requirement, and after giving notice closed accounts with less that that in them)
What things do I need to do up-front and what things can I defer to later, especially in light of the fact that it might be several months to a couple years before any substantial income starts coming in? This question's answer could be quite long. There are potentially many items you can defer. However, one I can say is that you might consider deferring incorporation. An individual can perform a business activity and draw income from it legally in a lot of situations. (For tax purposes, this is sometimes referred to as ""Schedule-C"" income.) I'm not saying incorporation is a bad thing (it can shield you from a lot of issues), but I am saying that it's not necessary on day 1 for a lot of small businesses. Having said that, this too can be easy to do on your own. Many companies offer services so you can incorporate for a few hundred dollars. If you do incorporate, as a small business of one person, I would definitely consider a tax concept called an ""S-Corp"" to avoid paying double taxes.) But here too, we've gone down the tax rabbit hole again. :-)"
"this is purely psychological.  most people are absolutely terrible at keeping track of their finances.  to the point where they will use multiple separate accounts for different types of spending or savings goals.  when the average person tells the banker they want an account for the money they are saving, they get handed a ""savings account"" and don't bother to question how it is different from a checking account."
"If you sign the check ""For Deposit Only"", the bank will put it in your account. You may need to set up a ""payable name"" on the account matching your DBA alias. However, having counted offerings for a church on several occasions, I know that banks simply have no choice but to be lax about the ""Pay to the Order Of"" line on checks. Say the church's ""legal name"" for which the operating funds account was opened is ""Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church of Red Bluff"". You'll get offering checks made out to ""Saint Barnabas"", ""Saint B's"", ""Episcopal Church of Red Bluff"", ""Red Bluff Episcopal"", ""Youth Group Fund"", ""Pastor Frank"", etc. The bank will take em all; just gotta stamp em with the endorsement for the church. Sometimes the money will be ""earmarked"" based on the payable line; any attempt to pay the pastor directly will go into his ""discretionary fund"", and anything payable to a specific subgroup of the church will go into their asset account line, but really all the cash goes directly to the same bank account anyway. For-profit operations are similar; an apartment complex may get checks payable to the apartment name, the management company name, even the landlord. I expect that your freelance work will be no different."