Recording account balance directly

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

salikh <salikh at gmail.com> writes:

[snip]
> So my questions are 
> 1) is there an easy way to register the fact, that some account had some
> specific balance on some date, and later edit transactions around that
> moment to meet the balance?
> 2) is there a way to have transaction that computes its "Expense" field from
> the fixed "resulting balance"  and previous balance?
> 3) or may be there is a different way to handle the situation without too
> much hassle?

What I do is that I periodically add a "Balancing Transaction" which is
a Transaction to Expenses:Miscelaneous (entered from the Cash account).
For the amount I type in "<REALBAL>-<CURBAL>" into the withdrawal
column, where <CURBAL> is the current balance as shown in GnuCash, and
<REALBAL> is the real balance that I want as of that transaction.

I only do this at the end of my processing.  So, for example yesterday I
went and entered in all the transactions for which I had receipts and
that I could remember.  Once I was done I found that I was off (what was
shown didn't match what I counted).  So I entered a balancing split to
account for the difference.

> I understand that my ways may be very much against the grain for the
> business accounting, but my use case is personal accounting, where even
> balance mismatch is tolerable, if it's not too big.

True, for business accounting you need to keep track of everything.  But
for personal accounting this method works fine.

The only thing to note is that once you enter in the balancing split you
should *not* enter any more transactions htat happened *before* the
balancing split.  If you do you will have to adjust the balance again.

Hope this helps,

> Thank you for your help!

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-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
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