[GNC] credit account negative balance increases with payment

[Stan Brown]

On 2023-03-04 10:26, Custom Shots wrote:
> I just noticed this. Something has changed. I keep 30 day backups and this
> has been going on in all my backups. When I add a payment transaction to my
> credit card account the negative balance increases instead of decreasing.
> Any clues to what is happening? I am using GnuCash Version: 4.8 Build ID:
> 4.8a+(2021-09-28) on Ubuntu 2022.04.2. The second half of the double entry
> transaction, the withdrawal from my checking account, works correctly.

Presumably by "correctly" you mean that the positive balance of the cash
or checking account goes down? If so, I agree with you that it's
correct: a credit to an asset account reduces the balance of that
account. (Paying someone is a credit to cash, and getting money from
someone is a debit to cash.)

To balance that credit, the other side of the transaction, the part
applied to your credit-card account, must be a debit. The credit-card
account is a liability, so a debit reduces its balance. If the balance
is already negative, then a debit will make it more negative.

You might take a look in Edit » Preferences » Accounts, under "Reverse
Balanced Accounts". I can't remember the details from when I set up my
data file a few years ago, but I do remember that on experimenting with
those settings the only one that _didn't_ give nonsensical results was
"Credit accounts".  (I mean nonsensical to me; I'm sure the developers
must have had some good reason for those other settings.)

So you might experiment with that setting. (You might also consider
ticking the box to use "formal accounting labels". Some people like the
informal ones, some don't. The formal labels require you to know what a
debit and a credit are, but that's easily learned and then at least one
layer of obscurity is removed when diagnosing unexpected behavior.)

But I'm trying to work out what you're reporting, and I don't understand
it. You say the credit-card account was negative before you made the
payment, and then it "increased". That doesn't seem right -- normally a
credit-card account would be positive, being your liability, the amount
you owe. (But the "Reverse Balanced Accounts" setting I mentioned above
could change that.)

Are you saying something like: the balance on your Visa account was
minus $200, and you paid $65, and now the balance is minus $265 instead
of the expected minus $135? That would be wrong under any circumstances,
as far as I can understand. Or did you mean it literally that the
account balance "increases", since minus $135 is greater than minus
$200? If that's what you meant, then everything is correct except that
the credit-card account is showing a minus sign in front of correct
balances, and for that I'd definitely have a look at "Reverse Balanced
Accounts".

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com