Any Interest in Configurable Imbalance name

[Derrick Hudson]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 08:29:17AM -0500, Donald Allen wrote:
[... snip everything ...]

| There may be some confusion in this discussion. First, I think several
| of us, myself included but perhaps not you, may be having trouble
| remembering how 1.8 actually worked.

I remember how the no-account "loophole" works because I had taken
advantage of it quite a lot in the past.  At the time I really didn't
fully understand double-entry accounting, and I wasn't tracking my
expenses very well (though I did thoroughly track my assets and
liabilities).  Most likely people who recorded things correctly
wouldn't have (much) experience with that aspect of gnucash.

| So there may be a gap between
| what is being proposed for the future and what 1.8 actually did.

This very well may be.  Actually, I hope this is the case :-).

| I think what Adam, Derek, and I (and others) are advocating is an
| option to prevent the user from entering a transaction that doesn't
| balance.

I agree that disallowing unbalanced transactions is a good thing.

| Whether that's what 1.8 did is beside the point (though your
| discussion of it is justified, since I mentioned 1.8 as having the
| desired behavior, which may not be correct), that's the proposal.

The problem with 1.8 was it provided a loophole that allowed a
transaction to be balanced by having a split with no account.  In my
opinion, the Imbalance account introduced in 2.0 is not a bad thing
because specifically because it closes that loophole.

There may be a better way to handle transaction entry, but as a user I
don't consider the automatic imbalance account to be a regression
compared to before.

-D

-- 
The fear of the Lord leads to life:
Then one rests content, untouched by trouble.
        Proverbs 19:23
 
www: http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/            jabber: dman at dman13.dyndns.org
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