Balance sheet report for a sub-group of accounts

Christian Stimming stimming@tuhh.de
Sun, 17 Jun 2001 11:49:55 +0200


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On Thursday 14 June 2001 03:48, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> There is another issue to do with this code, that I noticed WRT the
> balance sheet but also appears in the average-balance report.  What
> should we do if somebody has an asset parent account with, say, a credit
> card subaccount?
>
> At the moment, the credit card account will be displayed as an asset . .

I think it's the user's responsibility to get the account hierarchy right. 
In fact, I could imagine a credit card that *is* an asset, namely, if I 
had transferred money to my credit card account in advance. (i.e. I would 
use it as a debit card, not a credit card.) Since we can't know what the 
user intends to do, we shouldn't try to guess... However, if the register 
labels all are meant for a liability credit card account, we should 
consider to allow credit card accounts only as subaccounts of liability 
accounts.

In both ways I think the report code should safely assume that the account 
hierarchy setup is the user's responsibility. The only "right thing" that 
the reports can do is that they use exactly what the user has specified. 
In this case this is the account hierarchy as it is, i.e. IMHO it is 
correct to show the credit card account indeed as an asset.

Christian
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