newbie: one account under two top level accounts

[Linas Vepstas]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 10:08:54AM +1100, Conrad Canterford was heard to remark:
> On Sat, 2002-12-28 at 09:07, Mirko Koenig wrote:
> > I made two top level accounts: ebay and games.
> > If i spent money for games at ebay i make a transaction in the games account
> > under the ebay knot.
> > Eg: 15euro for a game, so the ebay account shows 15 euro too.
> > But i want the games top level account schow the 15 euro too.
> 
> This is not possible in gnucash. It breaks the fundamental assumption of
> double-entry accounting, on which gnucash is based. In double-entry
> accounting, everything must balance, and that is not possible if
> something is showing up in more than one place.
> 
> The solution would be to have a "category" field for each transaction,
> allowing you to specify none or more categories to which the transaction
> belongs, and then allowing reports to work on categories. This has been
> discussed before, but there are no plans to implement it that I'm aware
> of.

I missed the begining of this discussion, but ... 

In the old gnucash-1.2, the app statusbar (on the bottom) showed two
figures: the total of (assets-debts) and the total (income-expenses).
This status bar thing disappeared along the way.

Normally, if you start from a clean slate, these are equal.  After
a year, when you zero out income/expense accounts, they're no longer
equal (and the difference is the growth/decrease of the assets).

Maybe the request is for a top level thingy that would show these
two figures again?  

In the above example, 

Since the 'game' is an asset, it would show +15
Since the ebay account is an expense, it would also show +15,

and things would still balance, but the user would see the things that
mattered.

--linas

 

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