Virtual accounts?

[Jörg Schaible]

Maf. King wrote:

[snip]
> 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!)

Thanks guys for all your recommendations, I already played with it. What I
still don't get is how to handle expenses for those pots. When I pay
something the money is spent from one of

 Assets:Savings
 Assets:Checking Account
 Assets:Purse

For the normal balance the expenses would be assigned to

 Expenses:Car
 Expenses:Computer
 Expenses:Health

How can I match those when I have created the pots as sub-accounts like 

 Assets:Savings:Car
 Assets:Savings:Computer
 Assets:Savings:Health

... and created transactions between the pot and their parent. Maybe I just
don't know enough about GC2 - can I create a report for these pots,
something along

Car:
1st of month balance: 10000
transactions
end of month balance: 10200

Computer:
1st of month balance: 1000
transactions
end of month balance: 830

... ?

Although it would be nice to get the current balance of the pot looking at
the accounts page.

> 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.

Won't work with an online account .. or? When I get my online transactions
(using the HBCI module) they are already tied to the physical account ...

- Jörg