Any Interest in Configurable Imbalance name

[Derrick Hudson]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:04:08PM -0500, Donald Allen wrote:
| On Jan 4, 2008 11:18 AM, Jason Ahrens <jason at cougarcorp.net> wrote:

| > I actually don't mind the Imbalance accounts. Every now and then I screw
| > something up and notice that the Imbalance account has a non-0 balance,
| > so I have to fix something.
| >
| > As long as the ability for accounts with an imbalanced transaction in
| > them, and finding those imbalanced transactions is easy, I'm happy. I
| > found the Imbalanced account a functional and obvious way to do this. I
| > do agree though that sometimes Gnucash seems a little too eager to
| > assign transactions into it (i.e.: When I'm still editing values in a
| > split and haven't finalized it yet... Though I think Gnucash assumes
| > that if I press "enter", it means I'm done...)
| 
| Did you ever use v1.8.x? I'm trying to find out if you ever
| experienced the behavior some of us (Derek, Adam, me) are advocating
| returning to.

I did.  The only visible difference in the register is "" vs
"Imbalance-USD".

No version (that I have used; I think 1.6 may have been the earliest)
allowed entering an unbalanced transaction.  However, prior versions
did allow for a split to have no account.  It really is a subtle
semantic difference in the implementation.  Whether a split doesn't
exist at all or exists with no account, either way defeats the purpose
of double-entry accounting.


I think that automatically using "Imbalance-USD" as a placeholder for
the splits that previously would have been hidden with no account is a
good thing.  A user can always delete the account when they don't have
any errors.  It is a useful aid in finding transactions that were
entered incompletely.

As for gnucash being "too eager" to assign splits to the imbalance
account, I have noticed that as well.  While entering data, sometimes
I tend to press "enter" to move down to the next split.  This is
interpreted as recording (comitting) the transaction, so gnucash fills
in the missing "imbalance" split.  However, if I use tab (or the down
arrow), this does not occur.  I would consider this either pebkac or a
usability issue, however when the behavior is understood it is not
actually a problem.

I would also find it reasonable if gnucash did not automatically
create the imbalance account, if it /also/ did not allow a split to
have no account.  A user who wants to intentionally circumvent the
principles of double-entry can choose to create such an account and
assign splits to it when they want to.

-D

-- 
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
 
www: http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/            jabber: dman at dman13.dyndns.org
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