Recording account balance directly

[Colin Law]

On 17 June 2011 19:31, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> 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 think the OP already does that.  If I understand his question it is
that sometimes *after* entering the balance transaction he remembers a
purchase that needs to be entered before the balance transaction,
necessitating that the balance transaction needs to be modified to
keep it correct.  I too have had this problem.  His question is
whether there is a way of entering a transaction that says that at
this point the balance should be X and if I enter a new earlier
transaction then the balancing one will be automatically changed to
allow for this.  I think the answer is no, and in fact though it
sounds like a good idea it would be dangerous and would at some point
lead to unexpected effects.

Colin