Register stuff (summary of Carol and my talk).

Dave Peticolas dave@krondo.com
Tue, 24 Oct 2000 12:14:34 -0700


Richard -Gilligan- Uschold writes:
> 
> I've been using gnucash for a few months and one thing that really confused m
> was the way amount in the second or third line of a split always changes to
> maintain a zero total balance.  When I enter a transaction to pay a credit
> card, it typically has about a dozen splits.  Entering Discover Card on the
> Memo line recalls the previous months bill.  So, I change the total amount,
> and the first category, say gasoline, changes.  Then I enter the gasoline
> amount and the second category, say groceries changes.  Then I enter the
> grocery amount and the gasoline line changes again!  When I first saw this,
> thought gnucash was seriously broke.  I entered a few more category amounts
> and I figured out what was gong on.  I added an account for Unallocated
> Expense and put it in the second line, and now every thing works OK.  This is
> bad behavior.  Changing an amount the user just entered, with no explanation
> whatever, is not good.  The previous money program I used, Managing Your
> Money, automatically added an unallocated expense line at the end of a
> transaction to maintain the balance.  We need to work on a different way to
> handle this.

Your desciption of how MYM works is pretty much how we were planning
on doing things. Specifically, as you change the balances on splits
or add and delete splits, GnuCash would add/update/remove an 'extra'
split to maintain balance.

There would be at most one such split, and it would be deleted
automatically if it was no longer needed (i.e., its value needs
to be 0 for balance).

Does that sound like it would be better?

dave