[GNC] WHY ARE THERE "IMBALANCE ENTRIES" AT ALL ?? JUST CURIOUS

[DaveC49]

Laura,

The reason Imbalance entries exist is that it is a fundamental principle in
double entry accounting that the sum of the debits and credits to the
various accounts that make up a transaction must be zero.

The Imbalance results if a user creates and saves a transaction in which
this is not true. GNuCash tries to force your hand on this. You will notice
that if you create a transaction in which the sum of the debits and credits
is not zero, GnuCash will open a new line with an amount which will balance
that sum with no account selected in the account column. If you select an
account to assign that imbalance to, then the transaction is then balanced.
If you do not and save the transaction without specifically assigning an
account to it, GnuCash will assign the amount by which the transaction is
unbalanced to an Imbalance account in the currency of the accounts. If the
transaction involves more than one currency it will be in the currency which
is imbalanced in the transaction.

The value of the Imbalance account is that it allows you to quickly identify
transactions in which the user has incorrectly entered  data. There should
be no entries in any Imbalance account in any currency if your books are are
correctly balanced. Any transaction which turns up in an Imbalance account
NEEDS to be corrected and when it is corrected the Imbalance account balance
goes to 0 which it should always be if all entries are correct.
The following screen shot show creating an imbalance transaction and its
effect
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance_1.png> 
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-2.png> 
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-3.png> 
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-4.png> 
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-5.png> 

The debate is about where the Imbalance accounts should be located within
the chart of accounts and whether the user can move them to a designated
location and have theImbalance accounts created there in future. 

My personal preference would be that the Imbalance accounts only appear in
the Accounts Tab when there is an unbalanced entry in the accounts and that
they should be hidden/removed from the tab when the imbalance is corrected.
I would flag them further by changing the color of the text or background to
red in the accounts tab to indicate that this is an error state which should
be corrected.





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