Preserve Audit Trail: Option to disable modifying or editing reconciled transactions.
A journal entry should not be changed once it is written. One is supposed to write a correcting entry. This shows the error and the correction clearly. When journals were done by hand with ink pens one could be confident that one had a true record but with digital programs that is not the case. I know most programs allow you to go back, but that damages the audit trail. I'm suggesting a option to disable editing of entered and or reconciled transactions. Additionally one could have an option to show what entries had been changed. Finally one could have a option to turn off editing that would be permanent. Once set one could be sure no one edited the journals.
I think this is really important to use this for business. Another reason to have the feature is if an inexperienced user just happens to edit entries by mistake thinking they are entering a new transaction. That has happened to me.
Thanks for voting yes for this suggestion. :)
Regards,
Grant Rostig
Austin, Texas
Grant Rostig
shared this idea
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Byron
commented
Currently attempting to mark a reconciled transaction as unreconciled generates a warning. However changing the value of a reconciled transaction goes ahead without any warning and the transaction is marked unreconciled.
Generating this warning for all changes would go a long way to prevent the accidental overwriting of reconciled transactions. I myself have made this mistake and it can prove to be a real pain to resolve.
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AdminJohn Ralls (Developer, GnuCash) commented
Would the simple addition of such an option really satisfy the requirement? Or is the requirement really that the program must impose controls to ensure that the books can't be altered without creating journal entries?
As for preventing a debit balance in a trust account, can you elaborate on what that means and how it would be implemented?
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Rodney Griffiths
commented
I note the Bar Associations in various states in the USA permit Gnucash for trust accounting by lawyers. Not so in Australia. The reason being that software to be used by Lawyers in Australia must not be capable of accepting a transaction that would result in a debit balance to any trust account and must not be capable of amending a transaction already recorded otherwise than by journal entry. As an Australian lawyer I would welcome an option to permanently disable editing other than by journal entry. Would it be possible to also include an option to prevent acceptance of transactions in a trust account that would result in a debit balance? I believe Gnucash would be widely used by lawyers in Australia (and probably other jurisdictions) if these matters could be addressed.
Regards
Rodney Griffiths
Perth
Western Australia -
Grant Rostig
commented
I did find the feature to turn off edits more than n days old, and that is very helpful. However the reason for my suggestion is not to provide a un-crackable system, but to help users operate the system. For example I found myself moving my mouse, opening an entry, and then modifying a prior transaction. Thank you for you work on gnucash and responding. I still think this would be a good idea.
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This has been discussed at length on gnucash-users; the belief that you can rely on electronic records for an audit trail is a fantasy. Storage is either in XML or SQL, and both are easily edited outside of GnuCash, so any controls that GnuCash imposes can be defeated without much effort.
That aside, GnuCash's target market is homes and sole proprietorships, and our goal is to make the program easy for those users, not to supply a corporate-grade system.
Finally, while GnuCash doesn't have the ability to make all editing impossible, version 2.6 does provide an option to prevent editing transactions more than n days old, where n is configured in File>Properties on the Accounts tab: Set "Day Threshold for Read-Only Transactions (red line) to something other than 0.
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Grant Rostig
commented
Reliable Audit Trail and Error Avoidance - Vote YES.