transaction corrections

[Mike or Penny Novack]

> Gnucash is a usable program.  It however lacks something *very basic 
> and important.*  Any professional accounting program must not allow 
> the editing or deleting of entered transactions.   All corrections 
> must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the 
> original erroneous transaction.
>
> Sincerely,
> Jay Seidler

I agree with what the others have said, that there is little likelihood 
of a version to do this. But .........

a) There is nothing preventing professional standards bookkeeping 
procedures. In other words, instead of deleting an erroneous entry, 
stet, and make a correcting entry. Then the audit trail indicates 
exactly what was done.

b) The "locked"  version security would be more apparent than real. I am 
speaking as a retired senior analyst with a few decades experience in 
the cypher mines of one of the world's largest financials. It would be 
VERY difficult to construct a system where somebody like myself could 
not alter the data. Keep in mind not restricted to working WITHIN the 
application to do that and it's not just the data file used by the 
application that must be hard to manipulate but the logs/backup from 
which it might be reloaded.

Besides, let's be honest here. In the real world whether a couple 
correcting entries made or the transactions edited depends on the 
VOLUME. Suppose some less than happy morning it was discovered that 
because of a program change 50,000 transactions with errors were 
processed. No, did not print them out and have a bevy of worker bees sit 
at their terminals for a couple weeks entering correction transactions. 
We'd simply fix the program, rerun it so we now had all correct 
transactions, and then rerun general ledger for that night (recreating 
the files, replacing the bad file with the good, in my mind at least is 
just a form of "editing").

BTW --- the "b" I described (to edit that way) does NOT require any 
knowledge of programming. Just the ability to do a "restore" to the 
state before you made the transaction you want to edit out and then you 
re-enter all that day's transactions without the bad one.

Michael D Novack, FLMI