Issues with an Opening Balance in GnuCash

[John R. Sowden]

On 06/24/2016 07:08 AM, John Ralls wrote:
>> On Jun 24, 2016, at 6:01 AM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> When you find "parts" of transactions in orphan accounts, it means you have
>> not identified an account for the (required) split transaction.
> No, that's "Imbalance" accounts. "Orphan" accounts are created by deleting an account and somehow managing to not reassign its splits to another account. At the next file load or upon running "check and repair" GnuCash will create an "Orphan" account to hold those splits. Then there's "Orphaned Gains", the rather unfortunate name hard-coded into the Lots module for capital gains and losses.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>
>
gc should not allow an account to be deleted if it is referenced in any 
transactions.  Re: these 2 accounts, my concern is not that the amounts 
are put there, it's that they are put there without the user's knowledge 
in order to balance the transaction.  A solution might be a warning to 
the user that the transaction is out of balance and can only be closed 
by placing the difference in the Imbalance Account.  That way the user 
is clearly advised and will probably choose to fix it now rather than to 
try to figure it out later.

John