[GNC-dev] „Accruals are potentially missing as account_types in the db scheme

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 4/16/2022 6:56 AM, Alexander Damm wrote:
> "  If I understand correctly what you mean by "accruals" you mean that
> this report requires you to treat some liabilities differently than
> others. You need to be able to distinguish between them. This would not
> require a new "account type", just a partitioning of liabilities between
> "ordinary liabilities" << a place holder under liabilities; its children
> would be ordinary liabilities >> and "accruals" << a second place holder
> under liabilities; its children would be accounts that are "accruals" >>
>
> Then you only need to "scrape" the Balance Sheet as produced by gnucash."
>
>
> yes that is exactly what I would like to have.
> So you're suggesting to use the field "placeholder" in the table accounts
> and match all the accruals accounts under one account with the
> name:"accruals" and the account_type:"liablility" and the placeholder: "1"
> and the parent_guid: "(form the main accruals account)" ?
>
>
> regards alex

Yes, I am suggesting that it isn't gnucash that needs to change in order 
for it to produce OUTPUT that contains the DATA you need for German 
reporting and that you then write something (or convince somebody to do 
that for you) to "scrape" from the report produced by gnucash (and 
exported from gnucash). You also have to structure your CoA so that the 
data in the report will be easily separated out as needed,

That puts this specific German requirement OUTSIDE of gnucash proper so 
we don't need a "German version", "Ruritanian" version, etc. Each to be 
maintained annually as the jurisdictions change what they require. This 
seems obvious to me (isolating what has to be different) based on my 
professional experience (*) . Bear in mind, I'm in the US where not only 
the Federal government but each state might have different requirements.

Michael D Novack

(*) in other words, if in my working days I had been asked to design 
such a program (have "general ledger" produce the file as required by 
the government) THIS is the approach I would have advised the client to 
ask for (wearing my "business analyst hat") explaining that the 
separation would make the annual changes quicker/cheaper and then 
switching to my "systems analyst hat", how I would have speced it out 
for the programmers. Understand? Making the annual changes, no need to 
test the entire LARGE "general ledger" system but only the trivial add 
on that took a file from "general ledger" and massaged it to the 
required format for the government. Only THAT part would need to be 
tested when being changed.