Missing equity:opening balances account?

[Alice Lee]

Putting your opening balance in another account will not correct your
checking account balance.  You can make an opening balance entry which is
before the date that you will run your reports.  That entry also has to
balance.  You need to get your balance sheet from the date that precedes the
entries that you imported.  In other words if you imported entries for the
current year, you need to record balances from the end of the previous year.
Then if you have no entries on January 1, 2015,  you can make an opening
balance entry for January 1.  Then when you run reports for 2015, you would
run activity reports starting with January 2.
  
-----Original Message-----
From: gnucash-user
[mailto:gnucash-user-bounces+alee212007=satx.rr.com at gnucash.org] On Behalf
Of Allan
Sent: Sunday, May 3, 2015 8:33 AM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Missing equity:opening balances account?

Thanks David. I'll take that as a "yes".

On 05/03/2015 08:13 AM, David Carlson wrote:
> On 5/3/2015 6:34 AM, Allan wrote:
>> I set up an empty new file, imported csv files to create my accounts, 
>> and I didn't have any opening balance TX. Edit account on the 
>> checking account didn't show the opening balance tab like New account 
>> did. So I created an Equity:Opening Balances account eventually by 
>> creating a new account with an opening balance in the tab.
>>
>> Is that correct? The right way to create an opening balances account?
>>
>> Allan
>>
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> Allan
>
> The right way to use GnuCash is the way that works for you.  Having 
> said that, it helps if you at least pretend to follow common 
> accounting practice so you can show your work to an accountant and 
> (s)he will understand what you are up to.
>
> In your case the answer is to try creating a new test account of the 
> type you are interested in and switch to the opening balance tab while 
> doing that.  Actually, the opening balance tab is just a mini-wizard 
> designed to help you get that opening balance transaction entered 
> "correctly."  I personally think that it should still be visible if 
> you go back and try to edit an existing account, but the theory is 
> that would cause more mistakes than it would fix.
>
> Anyway, once you have seen an opening balance transaction you can 
> manually add a similar transaction to any account where you "forgot" 
> to do it in the first place.  I have used this technique often when I 
> decided that I wanted more history in a particular account than I had 
> initially entered.  I just use the default "Equity:Opening Balances"
> account.  Sometimes I even do that to "Offset for missing transactions"
> that I think I will fill in later.
>
> Have fun.
>
> avid C
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