How difficult is it (really) to reorganize a Chart-of-Accounts after the fact?

[Patrick Doyle]

Happy New Year!

Or as they say in the Doyle household, "New Year, New Financial
Management Software!".  Yay!


I'm about to dive into GNUCash.  I'm planning spending the day setting
up my chart of accounts to match my historical data, and importing my
historical data from my previous financial management software package
(Quicken 2006 -- I don't like to rush things).

In order to do that, I'm going to have to mangle my historical data to
match my new system.

There's a bit of "build a bridge across a chasm from both sides and
hope they meet in the middle" problem here, which is what I'm trying
to address now, and I think I've got a plan that will work.

But what happens if, sometime in March or so, after I've used GNUCash
for a while, I decide that I really should have organized my chart of
accounts slightly (or even significantly) differently?

I mentioned in a previous post (and got some fabulous feedback --
thank you very much Lance & John!) that I'm planning on using a bunch
of Equity subaccounts to track the "buckets" (or "envelopes") into
which I add and withdraw money as I get or spend it.

How difficult will it be if, for example, I decided to create
subaccounts called Equity:CarMaintenance, Equity:ChristmasFund, etc...
and later decided that I didn't want them to be subacounts of Equity,
but instead, wanted them to be top level accounts.

Or vice-versa.  Suppose I make them top level accounts today, and 3
months from now realize that they should have been subaccounts?

I presume simple name changes to accounts are trivial.  Is that true?

Suppose I decide my method of using equity (sub)accounts to track my
buckets just isn't working for me and I should follow the more
traditional approach of tracking income & expenses separately and
comparing that against GNC's budget.  How difficult will it be to
mass-move a bunch of debit transactions from one account to another,
while mass-moving a bunch of credit transactions from that account to
a different account?

I'm not afraid of doing all this in SQL after the fact.  (In fact, SQL
access to my financial data is a prime motivator for me moving to
GNC).

--wpd