Virtual accounts?

[Maf. King]

On Tuesday 23 January 2007 23:12, David Brown wrote:
> Ron Morse wrote:
> > Would split transactions do what you want?  Create your virtual
> > accounts as subs under your checking or savings account.  Money
> > moving into or out of the real account would, under GnuCash, get
> > split to the various subs as desired. The sum of the splits should
> > reflect the single transaction the bank sees.
>
> I tried doing this for a while, and it ended up making my register almost
> unreadable.
>
> What I currently do is that I create subaccounts under my savings account.
> All real transactions move into the savings account, and never into the
> subaccount.  Then, I have my own transactions between the savings account
> and the sub accounts.
>
> I guess this means that they really aren't sub accounts, since I don't
> reconcile them (I can clear things when they are matched up), but it lets
> me look at my top level account and see my balance.  When I was putting
> money directly into the sub accounts, I couldn't find an easy way to even
> find the balance.
>
> It'd be nice if it worked better, but at this point, I'm not even sure what
> that would mean.  My current approach works better than anything I've tried
> before.
>
> Dave
>

Hi,

I handle this the way Derek described, however, since he was a little terse 
(fair enough, he's a busy man...), I'll elaborate a little, and hopefully 
shed a little light.

My GC tree looks like:

Assets:Savings   (real-world account)
    Assets:Savings:Pot1    (virtual account)
    Assets:Savings:Pot2    (virtual account)

Now, I regularly save into pot1, and into pot2 on an ad-hoc basis.
Transactions for this are transfers between Checking and A:S:potN.

Now, Interest which this (real) account earns is shown by me in the parent 
account, as a transfer from income:interest, although you could put that into 
any particular pot.   I wouldn't recommend making any split transactions into 
multiple pots, as that will make reconciling difficult later on.

As Dave pointed out, the balance of the parent account register doesn't match 
the bank's idea of how much money I have, however, the account tree window 
does show that total balance of (A:S + A:S:pot1 + A:S:pot2)

When you reconcile against the bank statement, you need to check the "include 
sub-accounts" option in the reconcile starting dialog, then all the 
transactions show up in the reconcile window as though the sub-accounts don't 
exist. (I warned you about those split txns!)

Another possible option is to make the parent account a "placeholder" so that 
it never gets any transactions at all, and everything _has_ to be in a  
sub-account.  

YMMV, of course!

HTH,
Maf.