Can I simplify Gnucash?

[David T.]

Barnet,

I’m sorry to tell you, but, no, you won’t be able to remove these elements, as they are core aspects of the program.

Simply put, those aspects help ensure that your financial data are accurate—which is essentially the point of an accounting package. These elements are built on established accounting rules and guidelines.

Reconciling an account allows you to double check your entries against your bank’s. If you don’t care to monitor your bank’s books, then you don’t need to use that feature. I’ll note that if your books do ever get out of sync, the reconcile feature is useful, and using it regularly can ensure that you don’t have to examine every transaction in your file.

“Imbalance" appears because GnuCash uses double-entry accounting, and the Imbalance account informs you that GnuCash hasn’t got the second account for that transaction. 
The same is essentially true of the “Transfer” column—it appears because of GnuCash’s double-entry pedigree. If you think of the Transfer column as being similar to other accounting programs’ “Category” field, then it might be clearer how this is useful. You can use the transfer account to track how and where you spend you money.

If you truly don’t care to determine where your money goes, you can always just leave transactions assigned to the Imbalance account and ignore the transfer column; you could just consider that account to be “Miscellaneous” and let it go at that. Of course, you would miss out on a lot of information that most users of a financial package seek: where and how your money arrives and goes.

David

> On Mar 19, 2016, at 10:28 AM, Barnet Love <lovebarnetlove at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Love your program, but is it possible to simplify it?
> 
> I'm a Mac user. I don't need the "reconcile" tool or the "imbalance" or the "transfer" column.
> 
> I just want to list income and expenses and be able to run a report at the end of the year.
> 
> These features, while valuable to others, just confuse me. 
> 
> Is there a way to delete or disable those features? 
> 
> Thanks!
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