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

[David Carlson]

I might add here that there are corner cases where it is very difficult to
quickly bring a transaction into balance, and sometimes it is necessary for
an accounting judgement needing to be made.
Many of these cases arise when something does not have a well defined
value, so an estimated value needs to be assigned, possibly by someone
other than the person entering the transaction.
Other times it is necessary to draw on calculations that cannot be made on
the fly, such as realized gains on security sales, which may need
cumulative values from multiple opening transactions, along with multiple
previous partial closing transactions and time intervals calculated as well.

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 4:35 PM David Cousens <davidcousens49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> John,
>
> Actually you are given the opportunity to fix it during entry. When the
> Imbalance account appears in a transaction in the account column, all you
> have
> to do is click on it in the Account column and assign the correct account
> from
> the drop down list, before closing (pressing Enter) the transaction.
>
> In two split transactions GnuCash will assign the amount of the entry in
> the
> first split to the second split automatically and if you select a valid
> transfer
> account no imbalance will occur. If you don't select a valid account or
> alter
> the amount when creating a transaction with 3 or more splits, the
> imbalance can
> be created.
>
> As Michael indicated the other common scenario is when the target account
> does
> not exist and has not been created before entry.
> David Cousens
> (yet another David)
>
> On Tue, 2021-06-01 at 11:07 -0400, John Morris wrote:
> > Given the extremely long history of this question with many good people
> > expressing good reasons on both sides of the debate, I would have
> expected the
> > developers to give the user the choice. There should be a switch in the
> > preferences that allows the user to decide if the necessary extra
> accounts
> > will be created as needed to address an imbalance or the user will be
> forced
> > to correct the imbalance before completing the transaction. Personally, I
> > would choose the latter, but I am not allowed that freedom with GnuCash.
> >
> > John
> >
> > > The question about imbalance entries goes back a long ways in GnuCash,
> and
> > > you can find discussions about it in the lists over the years.
> > >
> > > Essentially, the debate boils down to this: is it better to allow a
> user to
> > > enter an imbalanced transaction and automatically create the balancing
> entry
> > > in a dummy account (Imbalance-XXX generically speaking), or should the
> > > program nag the user to balance the transaction every time? Gnucash
> choose
> > > the former many years ago, and has stuck with that model since.
> > >
> > > David
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-- 
David Carlson