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

[Linas Vepstas]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 09:57:49AM -0500, Bill Gribble was heard to remark:
> 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. 

The alternative would be to create a new account type, called
'organization'.  It would allow arbitrary subtypes, but couldn't itself
be made the child of anything but another 'organization'.  All
reports/balance sheets/etc. would be relative to the 'nearest' 
account of type 'organization', thus solving the reporting problems.

This is another thing that could be easy to add.  An enum and a few
checks in the engine, a few GUI tweaks.  Reports would be a little
gummed up... instead of reporting from the topmost group, they'd have to 
search for the parent 'organization' account.  We'd have to add a GUI
to the report allowing differrent 'organizations' to be selected.

--linas

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pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas@linas.org>
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