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

[Peter West]

I’m a fairly naive user, but I find the Imbalance-XXX and Orphan-XXX accounts (at top level in my CoA) extremely useful, and I understand why they are there. If I ever see a balance, I know I have to fix something, which is a good reason to have them at the top. I can’t comment on any changes that might have occurred in the behaviour of these accounts recently. However, in respect of the tidiness of the CoA, one possible solution is to create a special case for these accounts, such that they only display in the CoA listing when they have a non-zero balance.

Peter
—
Peter West
pbw at ehealth.id.au
“…unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

> On 2 Jun 2021, at 11:22 am, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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
> 
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
> -derek
> 
> -- 
>       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
>       derek at ihtfp.com <mailto:derek at ihtfp.com>             www.ihtfp.com <http://www.ihtfp.com/>
>       Computer and Internet Security Consultant
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe:
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information.
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.