Laura, The reason Imbalance entries exist is that it is a fundamental principle in double entry accounting that the sum of the debits and credits to the various accounts that make up a transaction must be zero.
The Imbalance results if a user creates and saves a transaction in which this is not true. GNuCash tries to force your hand on this. You will notice that if you create a transaction in which the sum of the debits and credits is not zero, GnuCash will open a new line with an amount which will balance that sum with no account selected in the account column. If you select an account to assign that imbalance to, then the transaction is then balanced. If you do not and save the transaction without specifically assigning an account to it, GnuCash will assign the amount by which the transaction is unbalanced to an Imbalance account in the currency of the accounts. If the transaction involves more than one currency it will be in the currency which is imbalanced in the transaction. The value of the Imbalance account is that it allows you to quickly identify transactions in which the user has incorrectly entered data. There should be no entries in any Imbalance account in any currency if your books are are correctly balanced. Any transaction which turns up in an Imbalance account NEEDS to be corrected and when it is corrected the Imbalance account balance goes to 0 which it should always be if all entries are correct. The following screen shot show creating an imbalance transaction and its effect <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance_1.png> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-2.png> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-3.png> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-4.png> <http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/t378312/Imbalance-5.png> The debate is about where the Imbalance accounts should be located within the chart of accounts and whether the user can move them to a designated location and have theImbalance accounts created there in future. My personal preference would be that the Imbalance accounts only appear in the Accounts Tab when there is an unbalanced entry in the accounts and that they should be hidden/removed from the tab when the imbalance is corrected. I would flag them further by changing the color of the text or background to red in the accounts tab to indicate that this is an error state which should be corrected. -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@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.