[GNC] credit account negative balance increases with payment

[john]

> On Mar 5, 2023, at 7:03 AM, Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> On 3/4/2023 1:26 PM, 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.
> 
> Are we confusing you?
> 
> Let's go back to the beginning (and that is where the mistake was)
> 
> What are you saying when you say "the credit card balance is negative"? What are you saying when you say "I owe you ten dollars" vs "I owe you NEGATIVE ten dollars".
> 
> The credit card account is a liability. If it INCREASES it means you owe more. If it decreases it means you owe less. So the transactions are doing the right thing. Your problem was with the initial balance. IF you started out owing NEGATIVE five hundred dollars and you made a payment of two hundred dollars the balance should be negative seven hundred dollars. In other words, your transactions were doing the right thing but your initial balance was on the wrong side of the ledger.
> 
> OK, you are where you are, how to correct your books. You apparently started your books with an amount for the credit card account of some negative amount X. So now you need to enter a correction transaction in the amount of 2X. The debit side would be starting equity and the credit side your credit card account. You are reducing your equity by 2X because you initially overstated it by X and you did owe X.

Michael,

Careful: The representation of the balance in the register depends on Preferences>Accounts>Reversed Balance Accounts. What you say is correct if the default Credit Accounts is selected, but if either of the others is selected then a credit card (or any other liability and equity) register will show a negative balance when used in the normal way.

Custom Shots,

Please tell us what you have set for that preference.
Regards,
John Ralls