Chart of accounts

[Derek Atkins]

James,

James Wilde <james.wilde at sunde-wilde.com> writes:

> On Aug 26, 2011, at 23:24 , David Carlson wrote:
>
>>> <big snip>
>
>> If the goal is a complete list of accounts with no data, how about
>> exporting the list first, opening the empty data file and creating an
>> Account Summary Report on the empty file?  There would still be zero
>> amounts, but they could then be more easily filtered out.
>
> I've seen this suggestion twice.  Excuse me, but doesn't it strike
> anybody that this is a very clumsy workaround for something that
> should be a click on a menu choice?  You give a chart of accounts to
> every newcomer to the accounting department so they will quickly learn
> about the structure of the accounting system.  You give it to every
> person who has to allocate expenses when (s)he approves invoices for
> payment.  But you don't necessarily want any of these people to see
> the balances on the accounts, so the account report is not an
> alternative.

This response says to me that GnuCash is not the right product for your
use case.  GnuCash is not a multi-user application.  If your
organization is large enough to have an Accounting Department then
you've already outgrown GnuCash.  GnuCash doesn't prevent anyone from
seeing balances, and there is no way to "approve invoices" inside
GnuCash without access to the (full) GnuCash database.

It sounds like you want Sage, Peachtree, or SAP.  Seriously.  GnuCash is
NOT targeting that audience.  It's more an open source solution for
users who would otherwise use something like Quicken or Quickbooks.
Those single-accounting-user solutions for home and SOHO situations.  In
none of those situations are there teams of people without access to the
data.

As for your comparrison to Open/LibreOffice, those applications started
with a corporate sponser.  For a long time Sun paid a team of people to
work on it!  Similarly, Firefox has a large team of people paid to work
on it.  GnuCash, on the other hand, has never ever had anyone ever paid
to work on it.  The fact that GnuCash is as good as it is says a lot
about the open source philosophy, and the fact that you ARE comparing it
to the likes of OOo and FF says a lot!  So thank you for that.  I'm glad
you feel GnuCash is in the same league as those other applications, but
I'm afraid that behind all the glitz there's a river of differences and
backing.

Expecting that people will jump at your "you suck for not supporting X"
is unkind to the active development team and frankly a bit offensive to
those who have spent countless hours, weeks, months, and years working
(for free, unpaid!) to make GnuCash as good as it is today.

Thanks,

> //James

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available