I'm going to repeat, probably, what's already been discussed. I understand why GnuCash creates the Imbalance account (among a few others, like Orphan and Equity:Opening Balance). I have no problem with that, and in practice those accounts have been useful - especially in catching errors.
I use GC for personal books (and now that my bookkeeper aka significant other has tried GC to review my records it is generally approved), and also for a small nonprofit I was drafted as treasurer of (because I admitted that my IT education included a basic bookkeeping class). For personal books, I ran GC, for a year or more, in parallel with an ancient system of spreadsheets that I developed over the decades, and finally converted at the beginning of this year. That's one thing the family bookkeeper very much likes: the spreadsheet were always having link problems and imbalance issues, and GC fixes all that. The argument seems to be one of appearances: the accounts are useful, but where they appear in the CoA should be more flexible than it is. I'll never argue against flexibility (Semper Gumby!), but it works both ways. The default should be the default, so people and the software know where to expect things to be. Variations on that should be possible, because various people and organizations don't do things the same way. That should be the end of the argument. GC is designed (it seems) to be relatively rigid because it didn't start out as full-fledged accounting software, competing with the Quickbooks and * Accounting of the world, though it has evolved in that direction. It was supposed to be simpler, more like Quicken. Either way, it works if you're not trying to do things that are too complicated for it. Keeping extra details for some records on the side can be helpful if it's too complicated, initially, to understand how to make it work right) in GC - stocks & mutual funds are a good example, for me - and spreadsheets are good for that. But anyway, my 2c worth, for what it's worth. -- 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.