Recording account balance directly

[Adam Funk]

On 2011-06-17, Derek Atkins wrote:

> salikh <salikh at gmail.com> writes:

>> 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.

Even in business accounting, it's accepted that cash will have to be
adjusted a bit.  In the accounting books I recall reading, there was
an expense account called "Cash Short & Over" for the purpose.