Involuntarily created additional account

[Josh Sled]

On Sun, 2006-07-16 at 09:08 +1000, Leslie Katz wrote:
> As to whether I'm using Gnucash "incorrectly", I really don't know what 
> to say. If I never insert a table in a document, even though I could, am 
> I using my word processing application incorrectly or am I just not 
> taking advantage of a feature of it? Provided that I can use Gnucash to 

A better analogy is that you're entering all your data as
comma-seperated-values in a single cell of a spreadsheet, then trying to
take a SUM(A1) and ignoring the error message.  Or if you start entering
a "table" by using multiple space characters in the word processor, it's
smart enough to say "hey I think you want to create an actual table",
and you say "no, thanks".

GnuCash is a double-entry accounting system.  Those dialogs you see
aren't trivial, they're error messages.  Some effort has been expended
to make it very easy to do double-entry accounting --- to hide most of
the complexity so that you end up creating doubly-entered transactions
without thinking twice.  Specifically, if your register view is in
"Basic Ledger" mode, all you need to do is enter transactions from the
appropriate Asset account's register, and indicate which Expense the
transaction applies to.

For the record, and as Derek mentioned, nothing has really changed
between 1.8 and 2.0 --- the constraint that has always been present in
GnuCash is just a little bit stronger, now.

Using the Imbalance account, in fact, is still double-entry: instead of
correctly entering against the relevant other (usually Expense) account,
the Imbalance account is being substituted so that the transaction is
always balanced, albeit in a useless manner.

I'd be curious to see your datafile.  I suspect that you don't have an
Expense-account hierarchy; that your transactions are entirely against
{Assets:Accounts:Checking} (or whatever) and {Imbalance-AUD}.  If so, at
least they should be against {Expenses:Miscellaneous}, but ideally
against an actual Expense hierarchy ... Expenses:Auto:Gas...
Expenses:Home... Expenses:Utilities:Electric ... this, imho, is one of
the key benefits of personal accounting: knowing what you're spending
money on.  You can only do that if you categorize expenses in some way.

-- 
...jsled
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`
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