Orphan-USD

[Derek Atkins]

Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8 at verizon.net> writes:

> John Ralls wrote:
>
>> Well, I mis-remembered the name of the account that the Lots function
>> sweeps to, it's "Orphaned Gains-USD" (the USD part is whatever
>> currency you use; it's US Dollars for me, but it might be GBP for
>> someone in England).
>> 
>> But when I make an unbalanced transaction, the balancing split is
>> created in "Imbalance-USD", not "Orphan-USD", so it's odd some of you
>> are seeing the latter.
>> 
>> Regards, John Ralls
>> 
>
>> 
>  I am still running gnucash-2.2.9-5.el5 because that is what I can find
> for my distribution.
>
> I have both of them in my list of accounts. Both have zero-balance. But
> since I did not explicitly create them, they must have turned up at one
> time or another, and I forget which is which. Sometimes I know I get one
> of them (Imbalance?) when I do a split transaction and enter before I
> finish all the parts of the split. But whatever the rules, sometimes it
> uses one and sometimes the other.

Yes, the Orphan-USD (and Imbalance-USD) accounts will get created
automatically when needed.  Looking at the code I beleive that
Orphan-xxx accounts get created when you have an existing Split but it
has no reference to an Account.  In this case the Split is an Orphaned
split so gets put into the Orphan account.  The Imbalance account
happens when you are working on a split-transaction and cause the commit
scrub function to execute when the transaction is not balanced.  In this
case it will add a balancing Split to the (created, if necessary)
Imbalance-xxx account.

When these accounts appear you should correct the problem and then you
can delete the Orphan or Imbalance accounts.

-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
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available