[GNC] Should GNUCash allow a split to reference the same account twice

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 20, 2023, at 10:46 AM, Henry Law <news at lawshouse.org> wrote:
> 
> Earlier today my wife was running GNUCash to update "her" bit of the
> accounts and got into a serious tangle because she (inadvertently)
> changed a newly-imported transaction so that its two splits -- which
> should have been our current account and her credit card account --
> both referred to the credit card account.  She then reconciled one half
> and not the other, which caused a cascade of issues which took me
> several hours and a manual edit to the GNUCash file to fix.

That's too bad. The transaction should have been readily apparent in both the credit card register and in the reconcile window because it would appear twice in both once with a debit and once with a credit: One doesn't usually have debits in a credit card account so that's an obvious red flag.  The register would also show the credit card account in the transfer account column, another easily-spotted red flag. The fix is to simply change that to the current account; GnuCash would I think ask you if you really want to change a reconciled transaction, to which you'd reply that you would, and once you had finished with it you'd re-do the reconcile.

> 
> Should GNUCash refuse to allow a transaction to have two splits into
> the same account?  My knowledge of accounting is scant, but with it I
> can't see why one would ever legitimately do that.
> 

It's normal in GnuCash to book both the sale and capital gains of a security or foreign currency asset in the same transaction by having two splits to the stock account.

Regards,
John Ralls