Balance Sheet Problems

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 12/17/2016 12:19 PM, csmbtreasurer wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestions.
>
> I finally deleted the Imbalance account entries and all seems fine now.
> This seems like a bug to me, is there a place to report bugs?
>
> Pete
This is almost certainly NOT a bug but an error in your data entry.

Simply deleting an imbalance amount is the wrong way to go and will 
"fix" the problem only in some very special circumstances << for 
example, you had multiple "forgot to enter an account when doing a split 
multiple times in the same split and the remainder of that split was in 
balance" it could work out correctly >>

This is NOT really a gnucash thing. If we were back in the old days, 
keeping our books pen and ink on paper, this is the same as entering a 
transaction into the journal where you spaced writing down the name of 
the account for some line of the transaction. You would notice that when 
posting to the ledger << where do I post this? >> And if you simply 
skipped that line, your ledger would be out of balance. Gnucash is 
simply letting you complete the transaction "in balance" by assigning 
the default account Imbalance. Not a crazy thing to do. In the course of 
entering a transaction you might decide that a change in the CoA would 
be a good idea << you can see that you will be wanting to split an 
account into two, for example >> While gnucash will allow you to do some 
changes of that sort on the fly, I usually prefer to step back to make 
sure I am making the changes correctly, so meantime, let me complete the 
transaction.

It is precisely when running a Balance Sheet that you would notice a 
non-zero balance for Imbalance. That means "find the problem(s) and 
correct, then rerun the Balance Sheet".

Michael D Novack