Split transaction in Wallet account

[John Ralls]

On Mar 21, 2010, at 1:52 PM, Andras Toth wrote:

> Hi, I am new to GnuCash and accounting principles.
> 
> Using GnuCash v.2.2.6, I am trying to create a split transaction for the
> expenses of a short trip into the account "Assets:Current Assets:Cash in
> Wallet". In the split transaction I would like to add entries like "Bus
> fare", "Museum entrance", etc. which should register expenses into
> different accounts (e.g. "Expenses:Travels", "Expenses:Culture", etc.).
> Following the steps from the manual [1], I enter the values and the
> destination accounts. However, whenever I hit enter, or press the "Record
> current transaction" icon, the split transaction from the Wallet account
> just _disappears_ (!), and the amount of spent money is not detracted from
> the amount in Wallet (i.e. it remains the same). However, individual
> transactions do appear as split transactions in the other accounts.
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 

Sounds like you're forgetting to include a split for the Wallet Account. You'll probably find the missing split in the "Imbalance-USD" (or whatever is the commodity/currency associated with your Wallet) account.

Notice in the example for a split transaction the last split to the Income:Salary, with its value in the right column; its value is the sum of the values in the left column. If the sum of the right column doesn't equal the sum of the left column, the transaction is "unbalanced". If you record an unbalanced transaction, Gnucash automatically creates a balancing split in the appropriate Imbalance account. You can see the imbalance before recording the transaction (by pressing "Enter" or mousing to a different transaction) by little gray x-boxes in each amount field.

Regards,
John Ralls