How to handle fixed term accounts?

[Maf. King]

On Monday 28 Jan 2008, Andy Den Tandt wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>
>
> What do you suggest for handling multiple fixed term investments belonging
> to a multiple banks?
>
> Suppose e.g. I have an investment starting 1 Feb for 1000 EUR for 3 months.
> On 1 May I'll receive my 1000EUR back + interest.  But I have multiple of
> these investments spread over multiple banks (e.g. 2000 EUR starting 1
> March for 1 month; 3000 EUR starting 1 Feb for 6 months; .)
>
>
>
> I could create separate accounts for each bank and have separate
> subaccounts for each investment. That will easily keep them separate so I
> can keep track of the different end-dates. But after a while I'll have more
> empty/dead accounts than active ones.
>
>
>
> Alternatively I could handle it as one huge savings account per bank (just
> throw everything together in one account) and lose track of the individual
> parts.
>
>
>
> Neither solution looks appealing. I'm hoping that you have better
> suggestions?
>

Hi Andy,

I think I would tend to favour the "one big account" approach, to avoid cruft 
in the accounts tree after a few months - however, what you could do is have 
sub-accounts for the currently active deposits, and then reparent the txns 
and delete the sub account when the fixed term ends, keeping the stale 
accounts out of the tree.

Ie
Assets:Current
Assets:Fixed-term
    + Deposit1
    + Deposit2
    +    ...
    + Historic
Income:Fixed-term-interest


You would therefore see a txn to open each DepositN account from 
Assets:current, and some time later a txn back to Current, and a txn for the 
interest earned, (which is presumably predictable and can be entered in 
advance, if you want to generate forecast reports).

When the deposit ends, you move the 3 txns into Assets:Fixed-term:Historic, 
(with some careful notes to the txns, you will be able to keep the info about 
what went where, when) and then delete the now-defunct account from the 
tree... (you could do this clean-up at fiscal year end, rather than at the 
end of each fixed term, if you prefer). 

HTH, IANAA, YMMV, $0.02 etc.
Maf.