ORPHAN vs. IMBALANCE

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 9, 2015, at 6:46 AM, Adam Funk <a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2015-02-06, Jan Steinman wrote:
> 
>>> From: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
>>> 
>>> Could someone explain to me the difference between ORPHAN and IMBALANCE accounts in GnuCash??
>> 
>> And can you map them into some other account?
>> 
>> I have an account called "Errors and Exceptions." It's main use is
>> when a cash drawer is over or short. In such a case, I'd like the
>> "Balance" button to automagically post to "Errors and Exceptions."
> 
> I'd prefer to have an option that will (for manually entered
> transactions) never create those unwanted accounts but instead will
> just not allow me to complete/save an unbalanced transaction.
> 

Not happening. Too much of GnuCash depends upon the assumption that all transactions are balanced. We'll entertain a patch to add an unbalanced transaction warning dialog with the choices "Edit Transaction" and "Balance it For Me", with a checkbox for "Always balance it for me" to turn it off and restore the current behavior. I don't think that any of the regular developers has time to implement this anytime soon.

Regards,
John Ralls