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

Derek Atkins derek at ihtfp.com
Tue Jun 1 21:22:00 EDT 2021


On Tue, June 1, 2021 9:15 pm, Liz Dodd wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Jun 2021 10:23:07 -0400
> "D. via gnucash-user" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> It is a problem when you are not aware of how to enter transactions,
> and press the Enter key, probably by habit.
> Nevertheless I can still find myself with Imbalance entries although I
> have been using Gnucash a long time.

Most of my Imbalance entries are a result of rounding errors in the
scheduled transaction subsystem.  I'll get an extra $0.01 that gets put
into Imbalance, until I get the statement and manually adjust the
transaction.

In the steady-state, Imbalance account is (and should remain) empty.

> Liz

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant



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