similar sets of accounts

[Derrick Hudson]

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 12:22:02PM +0100, Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz wrote:
| I maintain several sets of accounts (in different files). The skeleton
| of accounts is identical. The placeholder accounts are the same, income
| and expense accounts are identical; just the actual bank accounts and
| credit cards are different.
| 
| 1) Setting up the same accounts again is a bit tedious. Is there any
| means of copying the accounts without the transactions?

At the beginning of this year I wanted to copy all of my accounts, and
the scheduled transactions as well.  What I did was copy the file,
then open it up in vim and edit out all of the transactions.  I did
this because I had multiple thousand transactions from many years of
using gnucash, and loading the file was too slow (on my old hardware).

A few months ago I had a situation matching your description.  I don't
remember now if I used GnuCash's export feature to create the new file
(with new GUIDs) or if I manually copied the files and then edited the
top-level to have a new GUID.  In my situation I actually wanted a new
GUID, at least for the top-level "book".  See below for why.

Manual editing of the file is, naturally, not supported and is
certainly prone to human error.  For myself, I found it to be rather
easy and fast.


| 2) Custom reports are shared. I am not sure whether this is desirable
| in all situations but seeing as they are shared it would be convenient
| in my scenario if a report could be run on both accounts. However,
| this does not work, presumably because the internal account ids are
| different.

Using my technique, above, the account GUIDs are actually the same.
It might be a bad thing, but it worked for me.


Another option would be to use the "books" instead of the
"saved-reports" feature.  Just leave the reports open when you exit
gnucash.  The set of open windows, accounts, and reports ("books") is
stored separately in ~/.gnucash/books/ keyed on the GUID of the books.
I simply copied the one file to a new name, then manually adjusted the
"BookGuid" parameter at the top.  This gave me the exact same reports
open when I opened the new file.  I was then able to change the report
heading before I gave them to the people I was working with on these
accounts.


HTH,
-Derrick

-- 
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved
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