Couple of Questions

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 09:46:39PM -0800, David T. wrote:
> 1) What does "Add Reversing Transaction" do on the Transaction menu for a
> register? Help file has nothing.

It adds a transaction that has all the opposite credits and debits as
the selected transaction, so that the net effect is cancelled out.

> 2) I suspect that the account structure that got imported from Quicken is
> overly complex. For example, it has a separate account for dividend earnings
> for each stock and mutual fund I own or have ever owned. I am thinking about
> merging all these separated accounts into a few (tax-related) accounts. I would
> go from having Income:Dividends:Amazon, Income:Dividends:Microsoft ... etc. to
> simply Income:Dividends:Taxable and Income:Dividends:Tax-Free. But before I go
> ahead and do that, I thought I would check with others more experienced than I
> in these matters to see whether there might be a good reason to keep all the
> different accounts. Is there?

Sounds reasonable.  Ultimately, this is a personal preference (for
personal accounting, at least).  If you would prefer a different
hierarchy, you should probably change it.

> 
> 3) If I do go ahead and merge these transacttions together, is there a
> re-categorize feature, so that I could move all my transactions at one time
> without rekeying each transaction?

Option 1) In GnuCash 2.x, if you delete an account, you can select
another account into which to move all the transactions in the deleted
account.

Option 2) You could also create the higher-level account that you
want, and then _reparent_ the existing accounts under one of the
higher-level accounts.  i.e. create Income:Dividends:Taxable, and then
reparent Income:Dividends:Microsoft to
Incomce:Dividends:Taxable:Microsoft.

-chris