Null Account and more

[Derek Atkins]

linas at linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:

> On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 11:11:56AM -0500, Perry Smith was heard to remark:
>> 
>> When gnucash imported this, it created a sub account under "Interest" 
>> called "Fidelity Ultra" and Fidelity Ultra has a subaccount with no 
>> name.  I can see this in the xml as well as the Accounts window.  There 
>
> Possibly a bug in the qif importer ???

Could be.  That code is a pile of hairballs...

>>  "Interest" in quicken as well as gnucash is an expense but Fidelity 
>> Ultra is an income account and the account with no name is an income 
>
> Bad.  'Fidelity Ultra' should be an asset account of some kind, not
> an income account.  You cannot use income/expense accounts to hold
> anything of value.  Income/expense accounts are meant only to record
> income or expenses, for use in cash-flow type reports. 

Not necessarily...  What should happen, IIRC, is that you'll get
an account tree that looks something like this:

Assets
  +- Fidelity Ultra
     +- (stocks here)

Income
  +- Interest
     +- Fidelity Ultra

So in essence we'd get the interest income as a transfer from
Income:Interest:Fidelity Ultra -> Assets:Fidelity Ultra.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available