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

Reply via email to