General Journal

[Jesse C]

I feel like the original poster in this thread is laboring under some
rather archaic notions of what GnuCash is trying to provide and what it
should provide.  GnuCash is not meant to teach people how to do manual
double-entry book-keeping.  It is meant to provide a computerized
double-entry book-keeping system that significant improves on how manual
double-entry book-keeping works, due to the magic of computers.  The fact
that you have to enter every transaction into a journal is a tenant of
manual double-entry book-keeping.  But it is a stupid restriction in a
computerized system, since the computerized system can handle building the
correct journal entry from an account perspective.  If I enter a
transaction into a bank account view in GnuCash, it can figure out the
correct journal entry that needs to be made to balance out the
transaction.  This is way smarter than manual double-entry.

A manual double-entry system forces you to keep your journal and ledgers in
sync (I think I got those terms correct) through entering the same
transaction multiple times into the system.  In GnuCash, every transaction
is only entered once.  Period.  That is a huge difference between the
computerized version of double-entry and the manual method.  Therefore, in
GnuCash, it does not matter where you enter a transaction, as long as it is
correctly balanced.  This is a feature, not a bug.  It is part of computers
making life easier for people.  Clinging to archaic models of book-keeping
solely for the purpose of matching manual correctness is dumb.  It
increases the barrier to entry for new users and it makes the software
harder to use for everyone.  I consider myself pretty well-versed in the
fundamental underlying tenants of double-entry accounting.  However, if you
asked me to keep all my accounts in a manual DE system I'd laugh in your
face.  It is was too much work.  GnuCash greatly simplifies the data-entry
problem, without losing the correctness that DE book-keeping gives you.

cheers
jesse c