GnuCash

[Keith Bellairs]

Derek,

Didn't mean for it to be irrelevant. I understand that gnucash does not
support activity based accounting, and it doesn't hurt to let new users
know that. A knowledgeable user will understand that subaccounts do not
provide the functionality they are looking for. (You can sketch 3-space in
2-space, but its still 2-space.)

That said, I have been a satisfied gnucash user for xxx years (a really
long time) and have never felt the loss for not having activity based
accounting.

Sure would be an ugly patch.

Keith


On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Keith,
>
> Keith Bellairs <keith at bellairs.org> writes:
>
> > Subaccounts do not supply all of the functionality of "activity-based"
> > accounting, unfortunately. If I create subaccounts for each business and
> > track how much office supplies I use for each business it then becomes
> much
> > harder to answer the question, how much office supplies are we using all
> > together - you have to create a report that finds the office supplies
> > subaccount for each business. If you never have to answer the "all
> > together" question then subaccounts are fine.
> >
> > Activity based accounts really add a new "dimension" (in the mathematical
> > sense) to each account. It has already been mentioned that "activity" is
> > orthogonal to the existing account structure.
> >
> > Of course this creates a pain when entering data. Now you have to
> identify
> > both the activity and the rest of the account info for each transaction.
> So
> > it sounds cool but might not really get that much use in the typical
> case.
>
> While what you say here is correct, it's irrelevant here because GnuCash
> does not support "activity-based" tagging of transactions, so the only
> tool you have right now is additional subaccounts.
>
> Patches always welcome.
>
> > Keith
>
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -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
>