Reducing File Size

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>Glad to hear that you are making progress. It sounds like you are making
>goos progress. To address your questions;
>1. You should not need to make a new "file" to zero out the imbalance
>register. Just add a transaction, for the total amount, between
>imbalance and the desired register. I used "retained earnings" because
>it was there. I've been told that doing that is not the best accounting
>practice. Adding the transaction to a register called "accumulated
>earnings" may be more accurate.
>  
>
I'm afraid that I have not been following this discussion (because of 
the title line) so maybe way off base jumping in here BUT usually you 
would never want to "zero out the imbalance" account in one fell swoop. 
Instead you would want to correct every transaction that assigned 
something to "imbalance".

For example, perhaps the main way folks have transactions going to 
"imbalance" is that they forgot to enter the correct account (some other 
account). You can correct those entries very easily by bringing the 
transaction up for edit and this time filling in an account name instead 
of leaving blank. Or in a large split transaction, this time complete 
the job instead of entering only some of the splits.

In the old days (pen and ink on paper) you had to first FIND the 
offending transactions. Here gnucash is making it easy for you by having 
them all grouped in the "imbalance" account.

Michael D Novack, FLMI