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

[Benjamin Melançon]

Thank you all!

If my accountant enters the correction transactions as occurring on the
last day, how do i match them up with what they are correcting?  Their
description needs to include the date and description of the transactions
being corrected?

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 9:44 AM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
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