Thanks for all your responses. I guess the discussion went off track
here. Again, it's not a double-entry accounting issue, nor it's a split
issue, but a transaction consistency issue (probably related to database
transaction implementation).
Let's not to discuss whether it's a good idea or not to delete an
account that contains transactions. It's a valid user function in GC to
delete a non-empty account. If you follow the double-entry accounting
rule, the related transactions in other accounts should be deleted.
Instead, the related transactions in other accounts didn't get deleted
but got assigned to the default Inbalanced-USD account (so the
double-entry rule still hold here!). However, if you delete the
transactions individually, this problem won't occur. Transactions in
double-entried accounts will be deleted correctly.
The use case: I was importing credit card transactions to an account
via csv. After importing, all transactions got double-entried to the
default Inbalanced-USD account. After changing the Inbalanced-USDs to
the correct expense accounts for all the imported transactions, I
realized that I wasn't using negated amount for the credit card before
importing. So I decided to get rid of the credit card account and
create and re-import everything from scratch (luckily GC allows you to
do this), thus the inconsistency problem.
Thanks!
On 9/3/23 3:12 PM, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
On 9/3/2023 2:27 PM, Jediator wrote:
Hi, I'm a new GC user after using QB for many years. One problem I
encountered was when I delete an account with transactions (instead
of deleting transactions manually one at a time), the corresponding
transactions in other accounts won't get deleted automatically. For
instance, I have a payment transaction in a credit card account
related to a withdraw transaction in a checking account. When I
delete the credit card account with all its transactions, the related
withdraw transaction still remains in the checking account. Is this a
bug to be reported?
No, you are not understanding a basic concept of double entry
bookkeeping.
Each of those transactions in the CC account you are deleting had
another account associated with it (at least one other account, could
be more if a "split"). When you delete an account, you are NOT
deleting the transactions that were there but instead moving them
(that side of them that was in the CC account) to some other account.
We'll come back to that. Meanwhile, the opposite side of each of those
transactions remains where it was (in the account where it was).
So ...... let's look at one of those payment transactions more
closely. You see it there in the account of your checking account? <<
you said you were >> Well LOOK at one of those transactions (would be
a credit to the checking account). What is NOW the debit side of that
transaction. In other words, what account? THAT is what happened when
you deleted the account for that CC, they were MOVED there, not
deleted. You can't delete just one side of a transaction.
Question1 --- you say you were a long time QB user? QuickBooks and
not Quicken? Because QuickBooks is proper double entry7 bookkeeping
and would work the same way as gnucash with regard to deleting an
account. Of course possibly you never tried deleting an account in
QuickBooks.
Question2 --- WHAT are you trying to do here? Why are you deleting the
account of that CC? Normally, in proper bookkeeping you do NOT attempt
to change the past. If the situation is that this CC has been closed,
no longer being used, balance was zero at the time when closed, the
account is now INACTIVE and you don't want to see it taking up space
in your CoA, the action you want is HIDE, not delete.
Michael D Novack
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