transaction corrections
Gnucash is a usable program. It however lacks something *very basic and important.* Any professional accounting program must not allow the editing or deleting of entered transactions. All corrections must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the original erroneous transaction. Sincerely, Jay Seidler ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
Re: transaction corrections
True. However, gnucash is not, and does not pretend to be, a professional accounting program. I believe it started as a personal accounting program and expanded to business use. I would not be averse to having a professional mode which prevented transactions from being edited or deleted (other than text edits to description and memos). However, since gnucash is produced by volunteers, I don't think anyone is going to jump on this in the near future. Phil From: Jay Seidler jay.seid...@gmail.com To: gnucash-devel@gnucash.org Sent: Friday, August 7, 2009 5:55:23 AM Subject: transaction corrections Gnucash is a usable program. It however lacks something *very basic and important.* Any professional accounting program must not allow the editing or deleting of entered transactions. All corrections must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the original erroneous transaction. Sincerely, Jay Seidler ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
Re: transaction corrections
From: Jay Seidler jay.seid...@gmail.com To: gnucash-devel@gnucash.org Sent: Friday, August 7, 2009 5:55:23 AM Subject: transaction corrections Gnucash is a usable program. It however lacks something *very basic and important.* Any professional accounting program must not allow the editing or deleting of entered transactions. All corrections must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the original erroneous transaction. On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 06:44:58AM -0700, Phil Longstaff wrote: True. However, gnucash is not, and does not pretend to be, a professional accounting program. I believe it started as a personal accounting program and expanded to business use. I would not be averse to having a professional mode which prevented transactions from being edited or deleted (other than text edits to description and memos). However, since gnucash is produced by volunteers, I don't think anyone is going to jump on this in the near future. further, as has been discussed here before, there is nothing to prevent a sufficiently sophisticated user from either 1) turning off the professional mode, making a change and then turning it back on, or 2) manually editting the file or database to alter transactions. such a feature is, IMO, useless, and provides a false sense of security. .02 A signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
Re: transaction corrections
On Aug 7, 2009, at 8:15 AM, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: From: Jay Seidler jay.seid...@gmail.com To: gnucash-devel@gnucash.org Sent: Friday, August 7, 2009 5:55:23 AM Subject: transaction corrections Gnucash is a usable program. It however lacks something *very basic and important.* Any professional accounting program must not allow the editing or deleting of entered transactions. All corrections must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the original erroneous transaction. On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 06:44:58AM -0700, Phil Longstaff wrote: True. However, gnucash is not, and does not pretend to be, a professional accounting program. I believe it started as a personal accounting program and expanded to business use. I would not be averse to having a professional mode which prevented transactions from being edited or deleted (other than text edits to description and memos). However, since gnucash is produced by volunteers, I don't think anyone is going to jump on this in the near future. further, as has been discussed here before, there is nothing to prevent a sufficiently sophisticated user from either 1) turning off the professional mode, making a change and then turning it back on, or 2) manually editting the file or database to alter transactions. such a feature is, IMO, useless, and provides a false sense of security. .02 No, the professional mode could be set at compile time, and ordinary system security measures can be used to make the gnucash files inaccessible to nonadministrative users except through gnucash itself. Not that I'm interested in writing or using such a mode. Regards, John Ralls ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
Re: transaction corrections
Gnucash is a usable program. It however lacks something *very basic and important.* Any professional accounting program must not allow the editing or deleting of entered transactions. All corrections must be made by an additional correction entry which will refer to the original erroneous transaction. Sincerely, Jay Seidler I agree with what the others have said, that there is little likelihood of a version to do this. But . a) There is nothing preventing professional standards bookkeeping procedures. In other words, instead of deleting an erroneous entry, stet, and make a correcting entry. Then the audit trail indicates exactly what was done. b) The locked version security would be more apparent than real. I am speaking as a retired senior analyst with a few decades experience in the cypher mines of one of the world's largest financials. It would be VERY difficult to construct a system where somebody like myself could not alter the data. Keep in mind not restricted to working WITHIN the application to do that and it's not just the data file used by the application that must be hard to manipulate but the logs/backup from which it might be reloaded. Besides, let's be honest here. In the real world whether a couple correcting entries made or the transactions edited depends on the VOLUME. Suppose some less than happy morning it was discovered that because of a program change 50,000 transactions with errors were processed. No, did not print them out and have a bevy of worker bees sit at their terminals for a couple weeks entering correction transactions. We'd simply fix the program, rerun it so we now had all correct transactions, and then rerun general ledger for that night (recreating the files, replacing the bad file with the good, in my mind at least is just a form of editing). BTW --- the b I described (to edit that way) does NOT require any knowledge of programming. Just the ability to do a restore to the state before you made the transaction you want to edit out and then you re-enter all that day's transactions without the bad one. Michael D Novack, FLMI ___ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
