Cash Loanhow To Record Asset

Q: Cash loan - how to record asset? I'm stumped on this one. I took out a cash loan for $5000. I created a "Loan" type account in Money 2002 for it. So what I now have is a new liability that "just appeared from thin air". In other words, no associated asset. In reality, the money from the loan went straight into my checking account. How the heck do I reflect that in the transaction in my checking account? As far as I can see there is no way to use the category to do this. You can't use "Principal Transfer" or even "Transfer", which would probably screw it up anyway since loans in Money don't have any opening balance. They simply have the first payment as the first transaction, as if the loan account is simply a record of payments and was never the source of any associated asset. I guess making a negative $5000 payment to the loan from checking might work, but what the heck would that do the amortization of the loan? And then were back to the issue of these loans having no opening balance. If I did successfully record a transaction in checking that went to the loan account, what would that do to the loan balance? In other words, I can see no way to transfer "value" to and from these loan accounts to other accounts. They appear to exist in a totally separate isolated world from all the other account types in Money.

A: That will get the transaction into the register, but it still does not address the issue of "where did this $5000 deposit come from"? My job is to support the technical end of a business management software package. As a result, I have to know some very basic accounting. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but in any accounting transaction, you debit one or more accounts and credit one or more other accounts, with the sum of all the debits equaling the sum of all the credits. You basically "move" money from one account or G.L. account code to another. This single transaction shows where that money or "value" came from and where it went. The "Transfer" special category pretty much accomplishes the same thing in

Money, but for some reason cannot be used on Loan type accounts. It's like the Loan accounts in Money aren't true liability accounts in the accounting sense. They have no value. They are simply ledgers to record payment history. At any rate, if I enter the transaction in checking with no category, then I will have a $5000 liability that "appeared out of thin air" (one-sided entry) AND a $5000 asset that "appeared out of thin air" (one sided entry). I realize that everything will balance in the end, but I'd really like the transaction to accurately show that one account was credited and one was debited by this one transaction. It's hard to believe that this is not possible. .