Is there a way to make Journal Entries (or a workaround to have the same effect)?

[David Carlson]

On 2/27/2015 7:31 AM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 2/26/2015 8:30 PM, Alice Lee wrote:
>> Your accountant can make the entries directly into the general ledger,
>> dating them the last day of whatever period he is working with.  Then
>> make
>> an account report and send that to you.  You can make those entries into
>> your program.
> This is one of those cases where understanding what guncash is doing
> and also how old fashioned pen and ink on paper bookkeeping was done
> would be of great help.
>
> original method:  Transactions were first entered into a "journal"
> which was a record of transactions in date order. Each would have a
> debit account (or accounts) and a credit account (or accounts) and a
> description.The net of each transaction being of course zero (total
> debits = total credits).  These were then "posted" into the ledger
> accounts with that operation checked off to indicate done (the
> "posted" column). The manual process subject to transcription errors
> and there were all sorts of tricks to find the offending item but
> still tedious.
>
> gnucash method:  Autoposting in reverse. You enter the transaction
> directly in the ledger from any of the affected ledger accounts. The
> journal entry is never done and exists on in implicit form (there is a
> report you can request which is equivalent to a display of the journal
> that would have resulted in the ledger). No chance of a transcription
> error in posting as the computer will always do this correctly.
>
> a) Tell your accountant that is what gnucash is doing.
> b) Tell your accountant that it doesn't matter that gnucash doesn't
> have an explicit journal. That she can just give you the "journal
> transactions" for the transactions that would correct your books and
> you will then enter those into gnucash doing that the gnucash way
> (entering the transaction directly into the ledger from any of the
> affected ledger accounts and that WOULD enter the transaction into the
> implicit journal. The computer can check that what is entered is in
> balance.
> c) The reason for the confusion on the part of your accountant is that
> she pictures gnucash to be working in the reverse direction, in the
> same direction as old fashioned bookkeeping would have done it.
> Computerized with the "journal" real and the "ledger" implicit.
> d) One of the shortcuts in traditional bookkeeping was to recognize
> that 90+% of the transactions tended to affect just a few of the
> ledger accounts (cash being one of these). So there would be a subset
> of the ledger, usually on wide, multi-column paper known as the
> "cashbook" and if the transaction affected JUST a ledger account
> within this subset it was entered directly here with no explicit
> journal entry. Only transactions affecting an account outside this
> subset were entered into the journal and posted normally. It is THAT
> journal that your accountant is asking for. Doesn't exist because
> isn't needed by the gnucash way. Gnucash CAN have this "enter
> everything directly into the ledger" because it is easy for the
> computer to produce the equivalent journal entries on demand.
>
> Michael D Novack
>
> PS: After you have entered the correction transactions (and this is
> the proper way, NOT by changing existing entries) you will be able to
> produce the journal report for these to show to your accountant.
>
>
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This brings up an interesting point.  It would be nice if there were a
way to identify who initiated a particular entry.  It can be done today
by pre-pending the initiator's initials to the description without
changing GnuCash at all, but it would be nice in the future when the
program becomes multi-user to not only have an initiator field in the
record, but also a mechanism to support r/w permissions for users.

David C