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[Derek Atkins]

Ken Heard <ken at heard.name> writes:

> David T. wrote:
>>> But including the zeroing transaction in any report will throw your
>>> numbers off. If you have $1200 of Electric expenses in 2009, you
>>> will have a $1200 zeroing transaction on January 1 (or December 31,
>>> etc.), which will throw off the figure for the month of which it is
>>> a part. Month to month, you'll have $100--until that ZTM (zeroing
>>> transaction month), when you'll have -$1100. Yuck.
>
> How?  If for example the opening balance as of 1 January is $1200, and
> on that day you zero the income and expense accounts, the account
> balance at the end of that day will be zero.  Then if on 15 January you
> pay the electric bill of $100, and if there are no other entries except
> those made on those dates, the balance as of 31 January will be $100.
> Consequently any report which includes this account made to show the 31
> January position will show the balance of $100.  A report of the
> transactions in that account for the month of January will show the
> zeroing, but the explanation of the $1200 entry on 1 January is obvious.

The problem is that if you then run a report from Jan 1 - Jan 31, the
report will include the $1200 offset from the previous year and throw
off your numbers.  Sure, if you look at the individual transactions you
will see the $1200 and then you can manually take that out of your
numbers.  However you'll be really confused if you run this report and
see that you spent -$1100 on electricity in January.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available