Spam:********, Re: Class accounting?

[Colin Scott]

Being "classless" is not a problem, it is a feature!  Set up an
appropriate accounts structure and everything works fine - and in my view
this is the "correct" way to work.

That said, I will concede that setting up your accounts tree to work this
way is a pain in the proverbial because it is so laborious.  An ability
to copy chunks of the account tree from place to place might be useful,
but perhaps more useful would be some form of multi-account template to
deal with setting up the repeated account lists that can be necessary if
you don't have classes.

For example, in my Rotary Club we raise and spend money for a variety of
different charitable purposes.  You might want to keep track of the
various funds by assigning each of the various funds we support to a
class.  I would do it by having a list of acccounts, each relating to a
given fund, repeated at several different points in the tree. So for the
fund called "Fund_1" I might have the following accounts:- 

        Assets/Trust/Bank/Fund_1
        Income/Trust/Fund_1
        Expenditure/Trust/Costs/Fund_1
        Expenditure/Trust/Charitable Giving/Fund_1
 
This structure would enable me to keep track of our fund-raising efforts
and our charitable giving, and of the cash we hold for each fund.  Of
course, to add a new fund, I have to go around creating four new accounts,
one at each of the different points in the tree shown above.  This is not
difficult, but it is laborious.  It would be much better if I were able
to specify the structure shown above as a multi-account template, and
then each time I want to add a new fund I would simply provide the fund
name to the template, and all the required accounts would be created
automatically.

So, I don't think the lack of classes is an issue, but I think that
GnuCash could work a little harder to make its virtue even more virtuous!
:-)

Colin