Question to european gnucash users

[marthter]

Fredrik Persson wrote:

>On Tuesday 05 August 2003 20.19, Steve Hall wrote:
>
>What's the point of having checks, really?? They just seem to make everything 
>more complicated and difficult.
>  
>
You can put a cheque in your pocket.

You can present a cheque to a charity with lots of fanfare and get good 
press.

You can use a cheque as evidence in court (may be possible with 
electronic transactions, but somehow not as convincing).

You can put a cheque in a birthday card.

You can write someone a cheque during a power failure, or (gasp!) while 
away from your computer.

You can put a down-payment on a house with a cheque (I've yet to see 
this happen with electronic transactions, and I've been watching carefully).


I like electronic transactions as much as the next guy, and I have moved 
to them as much as possible.  But some people still give cheques (a 
customer of mine usually pays me that way as he has no internet access 
and lives 2 hours from his nearest bank), and expect to receive them (my 
landlord), so although cheques have shrunk to a small percentage of the 
transactions, everybody around here (Canada) still has to be prepared to 
accept them and provide them.

Just because you don't use cheques doesn't mean nobody should use them, 
and doesn't mean (as others have elaborated on) that reconciling is 
pointless or that the feature should be removed (which is what your 
comments seemed to be driving at).  You still can use reconciling to 
check your cheque-less transactions and ensure that the amount you 
intended to tip at the restaurant by Visa ('n' in the R column), matches 
what shows up in your running balance on Visa's site (which may take a 
few days to get posted depending on the vendor) ('c' in the R column), 
and is really how much they took according to your monthly (online or 
paper) statement ('y' in the R column).

Cheers.

~Martin


Yes, Canadians (and I suppose the rest of the Commonwealth) spell it 
that way.