Recording account balance directly

[salikh]

Hi,

I am trying to move my personal finance accounting from Gnumeric spreadsheet
to Gnucash,
so my use case may be a little bit off from regular accounting, but
anyway...

Among the normal accounts for bank, credit etc. I have an Assets:Wallet
account.
Most of the time I cannot remember all of the transactions, which I paid
from the wallet,
nor do I need that. However, I find it useful to track some specific
transactions (e.g. buying books),
which I paid from the wallet, in order to be able to track my expenses
later.
To keep the balance right, I often need to insert lump transaction for any
other expenses
directly from the wallet. A relatively easy was to do that is to enter
"<last balance> - <actual balance>" into the expence field, and Gnucash
would
compute the value and create a transaction which brings balance exactly to
the value I want.

The problem is, sometimes these lump transactions correspond to a quite long
periods of time,
e.g. couple of weeks, during which I didn't bothered to update tracking
sheet, and so sometimes
happens, that there were some substantial purchase, which I would like to
track as a separate
transaction with some specific Expense:xyz target. But, often I cannot
remember all of the
transactions right away, so I input a transaction that brings the balance to
actual value.
Later on, I remember what was the transaction that I'd like to track
separately, and I add
it with a date in the past, but then the previously created lump transaction
becomes incorrect,
because it does not record the resulting balance.
In fact, what I am often doing with 
a spreadsheet is to write down the end balance over some period of time
(e.g. 1 week), compute the expenses , and then remember one by one the big
expenses during that time period, until the remaining amount is small enough
to just put it into "Misc. expenses".

Ideally, I would like to be able to create a transaction which brings the
account to some specified
fixed balance (because every once in a while I count the remaining sum in my
wallet and register the balance), so that if I later add a new transaction
before that, it would automatically recompute its "expense" as "balance -
balance of the previous transaction".
However, it seems that currently Gnucash does not allow to input into the
"balance" field of a transaction
directly.

So my questions are 
1) is there an easy way to register the fact, that some account had some
specific balance on some date, and later edit transactions around that
moment to meet the balance?
2) is there a way to have transaction that computes its "Expense" field from
the fixed "resulting balance"  and previous balance?
3) or may be there is a different way to handle the situation without too
much hassle?

I understand that my ways may be very much against the grain for the
business accounting, but my use case is personal accounting, where even
balance mismatch is tolerable, if it's not too big.

Thank you for your help!

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