"correcting" transactions

[Keith Bellairs]

I have been trying not to get into this conversation.

As the security discussion demonstrates, auditors (real auditors) have no
reason to trust the inviolable accuracy of computer accounts. An auditor
tests the accuracy of the accounts by tying a sample of transactions back
to real source documents (receipts, invoices, etc.) So having an
"auditable" record of accounts is a bit of a fantasy. It is even possible
to keep two sets of accounts -- one for the tax man and the other for
yourself. What good is it if the phony "tax man" accounts are "auditable"?

Commercial ERPs try to keep the data clean by supporting separation of
roles; the person who writes the checks cannot be the one who reconciles
the bank accounts. And one has to have extraordinary authority to be able
to change a "posted" transaction. Most employees cannot do that, but it
does not mean that it cannot be done; ask any sysadmin. It seems like most
small business users of gnucash do not have the staff to seriously
implement business processes with different employees performing and
limited to different accounting tasks.

If you were going to try to bring gnucash up to that level, the question is
not how to create an unalterable data file (which Derek has tried to show
is a fool's errand) but rather how to provide for different business roles
with different permissions. And not worth the trouble for most of us who
use gnucash.

Keith