How to set up hierarchy for accounts? What is better?

[FireFly]

--- On Sun, 3/20/11, John Layman <john.layman at laymanandlayman.com> wrote:

> The account structure can still show
> you how much is in all savings
> accounts, how much is in all checking accounts, and so
> on.  But each
> individual bank account, investment account, etc. is a
> record-keeping entity
> in its own right, so they need also to be an easily
> identifiable entity in
> your own records. If you fracture them into pieces/parts,
> good luck when it
> comes to reconciling your records to those of the
> institutions!  The example
> given of a high-level  IRA umbrella is rather like
> saying, "I'd like to know
> how much I spend using debit cards, so I'll define a Debit
> Card account,
> Checks account and so forth.  As soon as you have more
> than one checking
> account with a debit card, you've got a mish-mash. 
> This is not just some
> matter of personal preference, it's a matter of structuring
> data so that it
> actually resembles the entity it is tracking.
> 

I'm not sure that anyone has suggested tracking outside of the actual entities? Maybe I missed it (and I've deleted all the older e-mails) but the original request seemed to be about whether you put [Bank Name] as an entity towards the start, or the end of the account structure, not splitting accounts into multiple pieces?


> "Better implies that one method is superior to another"
> 
> Yes, but no one said otherwise. Superior, on the other
> hand, has more than
> one meaning, last time I checked.  Perhaps you should
> try actually reading
> messages before you reply to them?

Maybe you should take your own advice there? The question being asked was "is a, better than b", my take on it is that neither is better than the other, they are just different ways of organizing that show different pieces of information easily. I could easily organize all my asset accounts under bank names, I don't because to me it doesn't matter how much I have in one individual bank, it's the collective set of checking accounts, or savings accounts that matter to me, someone else may be far more interested in knowing how much they have in holdings at a particular institution vs how much they have in savings accounts overall, it's all personal preference.