On 4/17/2023 4:01 AM, Richard Lindgren wrote:
Sounds like you understand my problem. However, since I'm not a programmer, I hesitate to tackle this patch. Maybe it is easier than it looks and is probably the best fix? I'm just nervous here.Let me ask this basic question. When I am creating my Budget, I have assumed this: 1. All Income values are positive numbers. 2. All Expense values are negative numbers. With that being said and used, my reports work for; a) Profit and Loss Report and b) my Budget Report. Now the question is, where do I go from here?
For me to be able to help you, you would need to stop thinking of positive and negative that way.
Double entry bookkeeping is older than the use of negative numbers in European mathematics. To ME, in the context of bookkeeping, positive means a balance in the sense expected for an account of that type and negative if in the sense opposite to what is expected for that sort of account. With the two senses being "debit" and "credit". (as opposed to positive and negative). Which is normal depends on the type of the account (or as we would say in the old days, on which side of the ledger -- picture an open book; there is a left hand page and a right hand page).
So ..... I would consider a income amount negative were it a debit and an expense amount negative were it a credit (say a rebate). That's because normal for account type income is credit and normal for account type expense is debit. Notice it is different say for the bank account involved as the other side of these transactions, but that is because its type is "asset".
When reporting a bug, I would suggest FIRST seeing if this bug manifests while using just the formal accounting senses debit and credit. If not, but you perceive the problem when using positive and negative, give serious consideration that the problem is not with the program but misunderstanding how positive and negative apply in this situation.
Michael D Novack _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
