1.6.x unable to put Expense/Income/Equity accounts in parent accounts of other types

[Bill Gribble]

On Tue, 2001-10-09 at 03:00, Mike Bell wrote:
> I am unable to find a way of creating an account under which subaccounts of
> all the types can be made in the 1.6.x releases. Without at least one
> account type which can be used to do this, there seems no way of creating
> organizational units for accounts, save using seperate files for each unit
> (at which point one is forced to break transactions apart, entering them
> once in each file as two unconnected transactions).

Right. You can't do that.  There's a single Chart of Accounts, which is
really the only view you can define of your accounts at the moment. The
chart doesn't really provide a general organizational grouping
construct; it's just intended to collect subaccounts that are counting
subtypes of the same thing as the parent accounts.  

Allowing arbitrary collections of accounts as children of some top-level
account makes it really, really hard to put together a sensible balance
sheet or compute balances for accounts with subaccounts. 

It's been discussed for some time that we need to use the tagging
facilities that are already available to implement some alternative
grouping constructs for organizing displays differently, but it hasn't
been done yet. It shouldn't be hard to add a "keyword" or "class" field
to the account editor that allows multiple string tags, then set up the
chart of accounts widget to be aware of those tags and somehow re-slice
the chart of accounts for display. 

b.g.