Recording account balance directly

[Adam Funk]

On 2011-06-18, Colin Law wrote:

> On 17 June 2011 19:31, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

>> 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.  

It depends on how important it is to you for the historic balances of
cash to be exactly right.  

If I find a receipt for a smallish transaction that dates from before
I last entered a "cash short and over" transaction, I just enter the
receipt in and ignore the fact that the cash balance from 3 weeks ago
is now £5 off.  If it's a large amount for an old cash purchase, I'd
enter it normally and enter another CS&O transaction with the opposite
effect on the cash account and the same date as the existing
adjustment.


(It's called "cash short and over", but it's always short!)