[GNC] Is there a way to find date & time a transaction was entered?

[David Cousens]

You can generally edit an incorrect transaction and just change the details
which are incorrect including the account in whose register it appears if that
happened to be incorrect

There is no problem with deleting a transaction in GnuCash. The formal
accounting method is basically a hangover when rubbing an entry out in a pen and
paper book created a fairly ugly mess (and made it exceedingly obvious that the
books had been altered) and left no trail as to why the changes were made.  

This is easy for non business feature transaction. Just select the transaction
in the register then select Transaction->Delete from the menu. 

Where transactions are created using the business features it is a little more
complicated. Payments to invoices are linked to the invoice so you would need to
delete the payment transactions first,and unpost the invoice and then delete the
information content (customer,details and amount etc). An invoice or bill cannot
be deleted from the system, once created it will always exist,  but an existing
uposted invoice from which the information has been deleted can be reused by
refilling in the new information and then reposting it.

David Cousens

On Mon, 2022-12-19 at 01:14 +0000, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
> I have a transaction that I entered incorrectly. Is there a way to
> determine the date & time that the transaction was entered? If so, I could
> just load a backup file created just before I screwed up.
> 
> I know that in formal accounting one should not delete transactions, but
> apply a reversing transaction. But I think that will just confuse me, and
> my accountant more. I don’t need to be too formal - previously I have
> submitted my accounts to my accountant on a spreadsheet, but that’s too
> error-prone for my liking.
> 
>  If I delete the transaction, would that put things back exactly as they
> were before the transaction was entered?
> 
> I spent about 20 minutes last night trying to understand how £14 had
> disappeared from the company bank account, clearly marked in the bank
> account that the money went to PayPal, but there was no record of the
> transaction on the company PayPal account.  I eventually found what had
> happened - it had gone to my personal PayPal account. There’s no way I
> would have spotted that error using spreadsheets. The double entry
> accounting does make finding errors easier than using a spreadsheet.
> 
> I must admit, I am quite impressed with GnuCash.
> 
> Dave