subtotals in reports; accounts with children and transactions

Charlton Rose gnucash-devel@sharkysoft.com
Fri, 6 Apr 2001 13:50:18 -0700 (PDT)


On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Christian Stimming wrote:

> Once again we had the question whether it makes sense at all to have
> accounts with children in the hierarchy (non-leaf accounts) with
> transactions in them.  ...  But in the long run we should consider
> adding a flag to the account structure where the user can specify
> "I'll not be using this account for transactions, only as
> parent-account".

If used correctly, parent accounts represent generalizations while child
accounts represent specializations.  For this reason, I think it makes a
lot of sense to aggregate the subtotals into the parent account, even if
it makes it difficult to see what the parent's actual contribution to the
total might be.  To solve that problem, perhaps you could display two
numbers in main window.  At any rate, don't remove that feature; make it a
user preference.

My expense subtree looks something like this:

expenses
	entertainment
	utilities
		electricity
		.
		.
		. (blah, blah, blah)

Often, when I don't have a category that an expense fits neatly into, I
simply throw it into "expenses" rather than into one of the subcategories.  
Every once in a while, I view the expenses register to see what has
accumulated there, and if I see a patern that can justify creating a new
subaccount, then I create the subaccount and move the transactions.  
Another way to do this, of course, is to just create an "expenses/misc"
child account, which is what I would have to do if the parent account was
one into which entering transactions was prohibited.

I can see valid arguments both ways on this issue, which is why we should
make it a configurable user preference rather than forcing the software to
go one way or the other.