You clearly haven't. ERPs that allow editing maintain a transaction log of edits. What users like about editing is they can run reporting for LOB's, then edit

You clearly haven't. ERPs that allow editing maintain a transaction log of edits. What users like about editing is they can run reporting for LOB's, then edit based on feedback / coding / miscoding, then rerun reports that are clean from a detail perspective without 100's of in/out offsetting entries you get when folks have to post reversing entries to back out errors. It's actually easier to review for correctness if you don't have to wade through 100's of junk entries that are reversed out. Different systems allow edits in different ways. Some are journals under the hood with the initial and reversing entry marked to hide visibility for non audit situations. Others maintain a log of edits, the date and time and items edited. All of this can be turned off at a permission level. Generally no line staff can edit, and closing a period to all edits is up at the top. And even when users can edit, they are always locked out as periods close. Yes - auditors do flip out if you edit into a closed period (understandably because they have to re-audit it). Users have gotten that confused with auditors not liking changes in periods that are not closed - actually - auditors want users to prepare the most accurate financials possible to submit in as simple a format as possible. Editing often allows that. Anyways, netsuite allows users to delete reversing journals from the original entry, oracle allows editing GL distributions on a posted entry (and uses an audit log for this) because if you had to deal only with reversing entries to fix stuff or had to reverse reversing entries to fix stuff it would drive everyone crazy.