enforce explicit double entry?

[Alan Su]

On 1/29/07, Cam Ellison <cam at ellisonpsychology.ca> wrote:
> Derek Atkins wrote:
> > Yeah, it's an oft-requested feature..  If there's not an entry in
> > bugzilla please create one.  This has annoyed me a few times, too.
> > It's especially an issue when working on a multi-split transaction.
>
> As a sort of work-around, I find that in some circumstances if I enter a
> value and then use the up-arrow, the residual will appear at the bottom
> of the split with no account selected (i.e. no orphan or imbalance).  I
> have not tried this with everything, but it does work if you duplicate
> an existing split entry - if you Tab or Enter or use the Down arrow, it
> creates an Imbalance account, if you use the Up arrow, there's no new
> account.

cool, this approach does work pretty well for multi-split
entries...that's good to know, as i'll probably be using the
auto-split entry mode for the most part.  in the end, i still feel
that, in general, gnucash is too willing to create the Imbalance-USD
account.  after a cursory search of the bugzilla database, i think
this enhancement request did not yet exist, so i filed it:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402289

a related entry is this one, reporting a bug where fixing a
transaction's imbalance zeros out the Imbalance-USD split but does not
delete it:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343711

i actually wasn't able to reproduce it, but it did make me think of a
behavior that might also be palatable to me.  suppose an Imbalance-USD
account/split was created because the user entered an unbalanced
transaction.  Correcting that transaction should result in the split
line being removed from the Imbalance-USD account.  If an account
could have configured to be "hidden when no entries exist" it would be
a nice "red flag" that would at least encourage the user to resolve
the underlying imbalance, even if it was too easy to introduce it in
the first place.

anyway, thanks for the comments!

-alan