[GNC] Transaction inconsistency when deleting account

[Jediator]

Thanks for all your responses.  I guess the discussion went off track 
here. Again, it's not a double-entry accounting issue, nor it's a split 
issue, but a transaction consistency issue (probably related to database 
transaction implementation).

Let's not to discuss whether it's a good idea or not to delete an 
account that contains transactions.  It's a valid user function in GC to 
delete a non-empty account.  If you follow the double-entry accounting 
rule, the related transactions in other accounts should be deleted.  
Instead, the related transactions in other accounts didn't get deleted 
but got assigned to the default Inbalanced-USD account (so the 
double-entry rule still hold here!).  However, if you delete the 
transactions individually, this problem won't occur. Transactions in 
double-entried accounts will be deleted correctly.

The use case:  I was importing credit card transactions to an account 
via csv.  After importing, all transactions got double-entried to the 
default Inbalanced-USD account. After changing the Inbalanced-USDs to 
the correct expense accounts for all the imported transactions, I 
realized that I wasn't using negated amount for the credit card before 
importing.   So I decided to get rid of the credit card account and 
create and re-import everything from scratch (luckily GC allows you to 
do this), thus the inconsistency problem.

Thanks!

On 9/3/23 3:12 PM, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 9/3/2023 2:27 PM, Jediator wrote:
>> Hi, I'm a new GC user after using QB for many years.  One problem I 
>> encountered was when I delete an account with transactions (instead 
>> of deleting transactions manually one at a time), the corresponding 
>> transactions in other accounts won't get deleted automatically.  For 
>> instance, I have a payment transaction in a credit card account 
>> related to a withdraw transaction in a checking account.  When I 
>> delete the credit card account with all its transactions, the related 
>> withdraw transaction still remains in the checking account. Is this a 
>> bug to be reported? 
>
> No, you are not understanding a basic concept of double entry 
> bookkeeping.
>
> Each of those transactions in the CC account you are deleting had 
> another account associated with it (at least one other account, could 
> be more if a "split"). When you delete an account, you are NOT 
> deleting the transactions that were there but instead moving them 
> (that side of them that was in the CC account) to some other account. 
> We'll come back to that. Meanwhile, the opposite side of each of those 
> transactions remains where it was (in the account where it was).
>
> So ...... let's look at one of those payment transactions more 
> closely. You see it there in the account of your checking account? << 
> you said you were >>  Well LOOK at one of those transactions (would be 
> a credit to the checking account). What is NOW the debit side of that 
> transaction. In other words, what account? THAT is what happened when 
> you deleted the account for that CC, they were MOVED there, not 
> deleted. You can't delete just one side of a transaction.
>
> Question1 --- you say you were a long time QB user?  QuickBooks and 
> not Quicken? Because QuickBooks is proper double entry7 bookkeeping 
> and would work the same way as gnucash with regard to deleting an 
> account. Of course possibly you never tried deleting an account in 
> QuickBooks.
>
> Question2 --- WHAT are you trying to do here? Why are you deleting the 
> account of that CC? Normally, in proper bookkeeping you do NOT attempt 
> to change the past. If the situation is that this CC has been closed, 
> no longer being used, balance was zero at the time when closed, the 
> account is now INACTIVE and you don't want to see it taking up space 
> in your CoA, the action you want is HIDE, not delete.
>
>
> Michael D Novack
>
>
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