I’m wondering if anyone can help me with a big mistake I made with a debt account and it’s debt envelope. I already had an envelope for computer related expenses with a number of transactions already assigned to it. I purchased a Dell computer overtime so I created a debt account and assigned it to the computer envelope. Everything worked great until I recently read a post from Tiffany saying when the debt gets paid off then the debt account can be deleted and the related envelope gets deleted.
Ah oh, I don’t want that envelope to get deleted because of all my past computer related expenses assigned to it. And I’ll still need that envelope for future expenses.
So, no big deal, I’ll rename the computer envelope that’s now assigned to the debt account to Dell Computer, create a new Computer envelope and just edit the transactions that are unrelated to the Dell computer to the new computer envelope. So far so good… until I got to a transaction that was paid by an old bank account that’s now deleted. Ugh, that didn’t work, now when I go and edit that transaction to change the envelope, I have to select an account that’s not deleted.
Alright, I better scrap that idea, and just change back the transactions to the Dell Computer envelope, so I can at least be back to where I was before trying this “brilliant” idea. Well, now I can’t do that because I just can’t edit the transaction by changing the envelope because GB tells me I have to use the debt tab for a debt account. Now I’m all mucked up. Any suggestions to fix this issue?
Just spitballing—could you recreate that transaction from a current account, then edit that account’s balance to make up for the “fake” transaction? That would create a single line item in your ledger which you could rename to indicate the source of the adjustment.
Would that work?
That’s definitely an option. Have you heard if GB can undelete an account? If they can I can just, ask them to undelete the affected accounts, fix my transactions, then re-delete those accounts
@alex is that possible? I was under the impression it’s not, but would love to be wrong.
Here’s another plug for allowing users to archive our data—that way we can “go back in time” to fix errors (like I made last month!!)
Ok, I’ve updated all my transactions except from one deleted account and one deleted envelope. If Alex can undelete these, then I can clean up those transactions and re-delete them. If he can’t than I’ll give your suggestion a try.
It’s probably too late now for this, but first, when you delete a Debt Account, you’ll be given the choice of what to do with the Debt Envelope, it won’t automatically delete as well. So in this case, if you still wanted the Computer Envelope, you could’ve deleted just the Account and retained the Envelope.
Unfortunately, we can’t restore Envelopes/Accounts unless they’ve basically just been deleted, because the older they get, the more things get tangled on top of them, and undoing the deletion (particularly for a quick fix like this) might just make things even worse… Since it sounds like these Envelopes and Accounts might have been deleted for some time, Tiffany’s solution might be the best for the “wrong Account” scenario.
For the “wrong Envelope” scenario, you should be able to move those transactions back once you’ve deleted the Debt Account and returned the Computer Envelope to being a non-Debt Envelope.
Hope that makes sense…sorry there’s not a more elegant solution to this.
@alex Ok, the perfect solution is just taking the option not to delete the envelope at time of deleting the debt account. I should’ve asked before mucking around with them😊
