[GNC] Transaction inconsistency when deleting account
Jediator
jediator at artemisspace.com
Tue Sep 5 00:28:35 EDT 2023
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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