Todd, When you edit a register and change a debit entry to a credit entry for example in the first line, the original transaction will have had an equal credit entry corresponding to the original debit entry. After you edit the first line younow have two credit entries for the transaction and no corresponding debit entry until you change the second line. GnuCash automatically balances the transaction so it creates a default debit entry to the Imbalance account. If you continue and then edit the original credit entry in the second line to make it a debit, the automatically calculated correcting entry to the Imbalance account should change to zero again and when you hit enter after correcting the second line.
This behavior is all described in the GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts guide and Help manual. You would really save yourself a lot of confusion if you worked through some of the examples on how the registers function. Chapter 6 of the Help manual https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-help/ch_Common_Trans_Ops.html describes what is happening and why. Whether to debit or credit an account in a transaction in an accounting program may also not be what you expect from the everday experience with bank statements etc. The actual behavior of debits and credits on each type of account is summarized below for each basic account type. Asset accounts: Debits increase the account balance - credits decrease the account balance; Liability Accounts: Debits decrease the account balance - credits increase the account balance; Equity Accounts: Debits decrease the account balance - credits increase the account balance; Income accounts: Debits decrease the account balance - credits increase the account balance; Expense accounts:Debits increase the account balance - credits decrease the account balance; this works like this because sum of the balances in the accounts of each account type in double entry satisfy the followingrelationship: Sum of Assets= Sum of of Liabilities + Sum of Equity +Sum of Income - Sum of Expenses and the requirement for each transaction that the Sum of the debit entries equals the sum of the credit entries. GnuCash strictly implements and enforces these requirements on accounts and transactions which is why you get the apparently inexplicable behavior. David Cousens David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- 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.