chart of accounts

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

John Sowden <jsowden at americansentry.net> writes:

> Balances are not a problem.  A chart of accounts is a standard accounting 
> document.  Yes, I create the account numbers. I place them in the "code" 
> field, but it seems that they are not used.

Define "used"?  The account codes are used inside gnucash, but they're
probably just not used how you want them to be used.

> I took you up on your suggestion.  I signed onto bugzilla, and suggested the
> item discussed.  In the mean time, is there a way to write to a text file, the 
> chart of accounts.  If so, please be specific, as i am a gnucash newbie.  It 
> took me a month a three responses to an newsgroup inquiry to find that I 
> should double click on an account line in the accounts screen to bring up the 
> transaction data entry, taking/putting funds into/out of that account.  That 
> includes reading the doc.

Uhh, I don't see any bug like this in the gnucash bug list.

> There seems to be an assumption that if one does not understand the working of 
> gnucash, that one does not understand accounting.  This is not so, and it 
> gets in the way of mutual support.

Well, _most_ people find the interface somewhat intuitive if they
understand accounting.  Granted, some esoteric accounting issues are
more challenging and I agree that the interface is not always as
intuitive for those cases.  IMHO using "Account Codes" as you seem to
want is rather esoteric in a modern computerized accounting world.

> The reason that I did not copy the datafile to the other computer is:
> 1) it is a different version of gnucash and linux (Suse 8.0 v Suse 8.2).
> 2) another user expressed problems, and it was confirmed that the path, etc. 
> are stored in the datafile, and any change causes problems.

#1 is not an issue; gnucash 1.8 data files are readable by any 1.8.x
variant.  At least, they should be.

#2 is only an issue for "saved reports".  The data file itself is
perfectly reasonable to move across machines.  The only issue is that
when you change the name of the file your saved reports will no longer
work unless you also fix the report configuration file in your
.gnucash directory.  So, in practice, #2 doesn't cause problems.

> John

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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