Imbalance account

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 7/15/2016 4:35 PM, csmbtreasurer wrote:
> Thanks, that's pretty much what I did, Deleting the mysterious transaction
> cleared everything up and all my accounts are in balance.
>
It would do THAT (put your accounts into balance*) even if you were 
wrong to delete the transaction. In other words, that there was some 
REAL financial activity that is now not recorded in your books. Not 
entering (or improperly deleting) a transaction is an error, but not one 
that will put the books out of balance.

And however experienced you might be with computers, how experienced 
with double entry bookkeeping. Could you manage a set of books old 
fashioned pen and ink on paper? Or using a spreadsheet with columns like 
would be on ledger paper?

I am very experienced with computers, professionally, and with financial 
systems in particular, several decades spent in the cypher mines. Sorry, 
but when something appears impossible, the FIRST thing to do is not jump 
to thinking it a bug but look for the human error. Especially when you 
are encountering a problem that seems to work just fine for everybody else.

Michael D Novack


* Your books WERE in balance before too. You misunderstand what the 
Imbalance account is (misunderstand double entry). It is an ACCOUNT, a 
"default account" that gnucash is using when no account was entered. In 
other words, the account used when "user filed to specify an account for 
this amount".