Some questions (i.e. temporary entries)

[Paul Schwartz]

--- On Tue, 10/19/10, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> From: Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>
> Subject: Re: Some questions (i.e. temporary entries)
> To: "Paul Schwartz" <pmjs1115 at yahoo.com>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org, "Geert Janssens" <janssens-geert at telenet.be>
> Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 2:48 PM
> 
> > Agreed, but I have found that the entry date is really
> important to figuring out what you have done. Also, I'm not
> sure how to get all of the entries together in one list,
> irrespective of what account they are in.
> > 
> > Paul
> > 
> >  
> Perhaps you could explain? I used to design software and
> run large financial systems and what ACTUAL (real time) date
> some file was processed very rarely of interest. Didn't
> affect the "effective date" of the transactions on that file
> and the "last changed" dates for auditing purposes were
> "effective date".
> 
> For none of the organizations for which I keep books do I
> do the GnuCash bookkeeping in "real time". I'm always
> entering the transactions only when i have a large enough
> batch to bother and only when I have all the information I
> need to enter them (emails "I can see that on date X you
> used your credit card in store Y and the amount was Z but
> what was purchased?" -- can't decide on which expense
> category till I know that). Personally I find it easier and
> less error prone to batch them by accounts affected so that
> I'm jumping around less.
> 
> PLEASE -- I am not saying that "entry date" might not be
> useful to you but can't advise until I know HOW you would
> use it and for what.
> 
> Michael D Novack, FLMI
> 
Thanks for your interest.

With my previous software, entries were tagged with an ordinal number as they were entered. This ordering made it easier to track actions, corrections, etc. when trouble shooting. With Gnucash, you can edit transactions at any time. Everything looks great when you get it right, but I have a hard time remembering all the corrective actions taken through the year.

Not Gnucash's fault, just a feature I think could be useful.

Paul