Irritating

[Terry Boldt]

I have now upgraded as you recommended to 1.8.2. Painless, as you said.

I do not see a lot of difference, but then this is good. gnucash is far enough 
along the development curve that the UI should be pretty stable. As for the 
more "exotic" functions, I probably will not "see" them until I have used it 
more. 

I haven't used it enough to tell whether the two aspects I found "irritating" 
in 1.6.8 are different in 1.8.2. I will probably "reconcile" sometime this 
week and will know about that then.

If you don't mind my asking, you stated that it is "wrong" to reconcile except 
on a monthly basis (or when the (e-)statement from the bank arrives). Your 
statement was:

> Well, that's your prerogative.  We can't keep you from shooting
> yourself in the foot, or doing things the "wrong" way.  If it works
> for you, that's fine.  But don't complain that there are artifacts of
> your incorrect usage.

I promise to never complain - scout's honor.

It's the "artifacts of your incorrect usage" that puzzles me. What exactly do 
you mean by this? What artifacts? The only artifact I can possibly see, being 
a complete novice at accounting, is that a transaction I reconciled might not 
be reconciled on the "official" statement. Is that what you mean? Or is there 
something "lurking" in gnucash that will possibly foul things up if I 
continue reconciling from the online database? Since I find it extremely 
unlikely that the bank would (or could) let the online data get out of synch 
with their offline data, I don't understand this statement. Is there some 
inherent assumption in gnucash that reconciling should only be done on a 
strict schedule? or at a minimum of monthly? or something else? This 
statement really puzzles me. Or is there something in accounting principles 
that will really foul things up by reconciling on a weekly basis? or 
sometimes weekly and sometimes bi-weekly and not really on a strict 30 day 
rotation? or by having a somewhat random pattern to reconciling instead of a 
regular pattern? This puzzles me because I am concerned that I am missing 
something basic here. I do not mean this facetiously or anything like that. I 
would really like to know. I definitely do not want to shoot myself in the 
foot. Please educate me if you have the time to do so.

I like the option of compressing the gnucash database. My practice is to 
delete all of the ".log" and ".xac" files created by gnucash immediately upon 
exiting. I then tar and gzip the entire directory structure in which all of 
the financial information is contained. This file is then copied into a 
directory on a separate HDD. This is all done in a script invoked on exiting 
gnucash. The compression of the gnucash database by gnucash has saved 
considerable space for th HDD containing the original directory structure.

The only option I am still anxious for is the option to close a book and thus 
be able to delete accounts which are currently inactive. Having to carry 
these accounts forward all the time is really bloating the account structure. 
I realize that this option is far from trivial, but I have been heartened to 
see some of the discussion concerning doing this. Deleting the accounts 
without closing a "book" just doesn't seem practicable to me.