I've never understood accounting really, apart from the basic concepts. Supposing I want to keep a better track of my money, I'm using Excel at this moment. I guess I need to move to some double entry balanced accounting system.
The question is, how do you declare your income? Is there a table for that?
Create an account called, say, "Paycheck". When you get paid, create an entry with your gross income as a deposit. For each deduction in your paycheck, create a minus (or expense) entry. After doing that, what will be left in the Paycheck account will be your net income. Simply transfer this amount to the real account your paycheck goes into (your checking account, probably).
Almost all the time, the value of your Paycheck account will be 0. It will be nonzero only for a moment every two weeks (or however often you get paid).
I don't know if this is the standard way of doing it (in the professional accounting world). It's a way I developed on my own and it works well, I think. I think it's better than just adding a deposit entry in your checking account for your net income as it lets you keep track of all your deductions.
(I use Quicken for the Mac. Before they added a Paycheck feature, I used this method. Then they removed the Paycheck feature from the latest version of Quicken for the Mac and I now use this method again.)
I don't think you need double-entry bookkeeping.
To quote Robert Kiyosaki (roughly): Income is when money enters you pocket, and expenses are when money leaves your pocket. Income is an addition; expenses are subtractions.
But if you want double-entry accounting, I'm not qualified to answer that. :)
Congratulations on keeping better track of your finances!
Typically there will be a class of accounts labelled "Income", under which you will have a separate account for each type of income (stock dividends, paychecks, home appreciation, etc).
In that case, showing your income would be a transfer from the Paycheck account to your Checking account. Note that, as there are no offsetting transactions, this means your income account will steadily accrue a balance over time - just ignore this number, it's only the sum of all your paychecks. There are methods of dealing with that number (and making the income account have a zero balance), but you don't need to worry about it at this stage. Just learning to properly track expenses is the major accomplishment.
