GnuCash and Swedish accounting legislation

[John Ralls]

> On Feb 2, 2016, at 8:17 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 18 January 2016 at 08:18, Draug <draug at kolabnow.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> For quite a while I've used GnuCash for the accounting of my company, but
>> recently I've come to question if it's legal to use GnuCash for that
>> purpose. According to Swedish accounting legislation, you are not allowed to
>> use accounting software that allows you to edit registered transactions
>> (where they use Excel as an example), which to my knowledge is quite easy to
>> do in GnuCash, even after reconcilation. Swedish accounting legislation
>> requires that every mistake is corrected with another transaction, and that
>> the mistake is left intact in the records.
>> 
>> Is there anything that I've missed that makes it possible to use GnuCash in
>> accordance with Swedish law? I really want to avoid switching to some
>> proprietary, cloud-based accounting software that costs $12 a month to use.
> 
> An email from Geert in a different thread has reminded me that there
> is already code that optionally makes reconciled transactions read
> only. I wonder then whether it would in fact be a fairly simple change
> to the code to make it so that /all/ transactions would be locked,
> dependent on a configuration option that could be set but not cleared.
> 

Yes, the locking code is already in place—or more likely, in several places—so it would just take a creation option in the New File Assistant to make a book immediately lock transactions. Like the root account currency, it would be unchangeable once the book is created. 

I don't think we'd want it to be a config option because that would require either that users who want the feature build it themselves or that distros and we provide multiple packages. Building is beyond the ability of most of our target audience, particularly on Macs and Windows, and aside from the distros probably not wanting to cooperate there's a good chance that many users would accidentally get the build they didn't want.

Regards,
John Ralls