DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ACCTS PAGE & REGISTER

[Yawar Amin]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Andrew Sackville-West <
andrew at swclan.homelinux.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:13:16PM -0400, _ wrote:
>
> > *REPLY:  What I'm saying is that I would expect to see the same TOTAL
> > balance on the ACCOUNTS PAGE as I see in the register itself for that
> > particular PARENT account.  That did not happen, but I must have a
> > misunderstanding on the way the parent and child works. But I'm still
> > working with it to see if I can get it to do what I want.   Otherwise, I
> > will just have to go back to my Excel spreadsheet.  GnuCash does not
> > seem to be quite as versatile as I had thought.  I just thought someone
> > might have experienced something similar and had a quick answer.
> > Future dates also had nothing to do with the problem.  Thanks.*
>
> so you are expecting that on the accounts page, a parent account would
> show only it's own balance, and not the accumulated balance of itself
> and it's child accounts?  That is not how it behaves. The parent
> account balance always shows the parent account and the child accounts
> as an accumulated total. So far as I know, there is no way to make it
> do otherwise.

[snip]

This is an interesting problem I thought about when I first started using
Gnucash. I used a naming convention to indicate hierarchy, instead of
Gnucash's built-in parent-child relationships. So for example, I have:

- ROOT Account
  .
  .
  .
  Exp_Telecom
  Exp_Telecom_Me
  Exp_Telecom_Parents
  .
  .
  .

Anything phone related that's for general use (myself or my parents), like a
calling card for say $5, goes into Exp_Telecom. My phone and Skype bills go
into Exp_Telecom_Me, and my parents' phone bills go into
Exp_Telecom_Parents.

This avoids the problems of Gnucash calculating total balances for all
Exp_Telecom + Exp_Telecom_* on the accounts page.

HTH

Yawar