Accounting questions, some general and some Stessa-specific?

[Rheann Evers]

Hi all.  I'm relatively new here, been hanging out and using calculators on my husband's Pro account for the last 6 mos or so but decided to start my own for topics like these.  Is there anyone out there that's an accountant AND familiar with Stessa?  (I realize that may be a long shot, an accountant wouldn't NEED Stessa, but maybe you have a client or two that does, and you've become familiar?)

Let me also just say that if anyone knows of a good "accounting basics for investors" book/website/resource, please post it!

Some of my questions may not be Stessa-specific - it's just been 25 years since I've had an accounting class, and we've introduced some new stuff into our business in the last few months...

1) We have a couple of HELOCs opened up. When they pull into Stessa, money OUT (ie we took out $40k to pay cash for a house) shows as a positive. I don't know if this is a Stessa glitch or because when I withdraw money from that account, my HELOC balance actually goes *up*? I'm having a hard time figuring out how to categorize ANY transaction that relates to these HELOCs, particularly when I'm transferring from one account to pay another, to the point that I'm close to ready to just delete most of the transactions and just go back in and add interest charges because I don't want to double-count anything accidentally. I'd appreciate some thoughts, big picture to minutia, on how to wrap my head around this.

2)When we closed on a HELOC, we had these "prepaids & fees":

Flood Certification

Title Insurance

Recording Fees

Origination Fee

Property Tax Tracking

Real Estate Valuation (is this another way of saying appraisal?!)

I initially lumped the entire amount into Bank fees.  Is this accurate (enough) or how should I be breaking it down further?

3) so then, if I did just for simplicity's sake delete the HELOC transactions and manually input them, how do I categorize paying cash for a house? Is it ok that the money just appears out of nowhere, so to speak?

4) Can I lump everything else on the closing statement into closing costs - or like the HELOC, do I need to be more specific? ie title insurance...I don't even see a category specifically for that in Stessa. Or if there's an assignment fee, does that get separated out? Or ultimately is the "bottom line" of what we paid the only number that matters?

I can probably come up with about a hundred more questions as I slog through this.  Thanks to anyone that has read this far, I appreciate your thoughts!