Issues with Placeholder Accounts

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 9 23:17:57 EST 2017


Hello, 

I will preface this email with a reminder that I am not a developer, and apologize ahead of time if my understanding of GnuCash functionality is flawed. That said...

In the course of trying to corral a problem with Unrealized Gains reporting, I have been dealing with accounts that have had the Placeholder flag set. As folks here are no doubt aware, this flag sets the account to read-only status, and indeed, when I open one of these accounts, I am informed of that fact in a dialog box.

However, there are numerous situations in which GnuCash does not respect this. For example: it is possible to create multiple transactions in a Commodity type account by using the lots feature and scrubbing the account. Similarly, one can edit the split in a placeholder account by accessing the transaction from the far account, which is not set to placeholder. I don’t know whether there are other such exceptional circumstances.

Both of these undermine the concept of a placeholder account, and raise some interesting thoughts for me. 

First, I think the lots feature needs to take this flag into account; it is quite easy to scrub an account and generate numerous gains transactions in a placeholder account, which might cause major problems for an unsuspecting user.

Second, I wonder where the placeholder flag is evaluated; it appears to be at the register or perhaps transaction level, but really, it should be evaluated at the split. Changing this is, I am sure, likely to be a painful fix, but I think it ultimately would yield a more consistent result. Evaluating at the split would prevent my second scenario from going through.

Third, I wonder if this “Placeholder for people but not processes” concept might not be leveraged to address the fragility of A/R and A/P business features. That is, have these accounts sets to Placeholder so that users do not edit these transactions directly (something that Derek notes he has been repeating on the lists for ten years), but use processes to modify the data entered into these accounts. Please be aware that I am not a business user, so I only am going on third party information on this. If this is in fact how it is set up, or if the idea is fundamentally dumb, I apologize.

David



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