Top level account without any type (or file links)

[David Carlson]

On 5/16/2012 11:04 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:
> On 16-05-12 17:35, Colin Scott wrote:
>>> In fact, what you really want is:
>>>
>>> A separate set of books for each partnership.
>> The real downside of this is that (unless something has changed
>> recently) it isn't possible to keep more than one set of books open
>> at the same time.  If you are the book-keeper for multiple sets of
>> accounts, moving from one set of books to the next is slow and
>> horribly clunky.
>> As Treasurer of my Rotary Club I am required to keep two sets of
>> accounts - those relating to the management of the Club itself, and
>> those relating to the Club's charitable activities.  These sets of
>> books are essentially separate, but there are linkages, in that there
>> are fairly frequent transfers of funds from the Club books to the
>> Charity books
>>
>> Arranging this as two completely separate sets of books is, frankly,
>> a nightmare, for the reasons given above.  I have therefore had to
>> set up Club and Charity branches under each of the four top-level
>> accounts, and then when reporting enusre that I only use accounts
>> from the relevant branches.
>>
>> Were the top level account always of type "Books", and accounts of
>> types Assets, Equity, Income, Expenditure etc always required to have
>> a Books parent, then I could arrange things simply.  The top level of
>> the hierarchy would be Rotary Books, under which I would have Club
>> and Charity Books, and then the conventional structure underneath
>> each of those.  In this configuration, a) my books would be *far*
>> easier to manage than they are now, and b) I would be able to switch
>> between the two sets of books without having to close one file and
>> open another, and c) I would be able to create transactions
>> legitimately spanning the two sets of books.
>>
>> Note:  I understand that implementation of such a scheme would be
>> non-trivial, as it would undoubtedly involve some fairly fundamental
>> changes to the way data is managed.  I therefore would not expect
>> such a change to occur any time soon, or even at all.  Perhaps a
>> simpler and neater solution to this recurring question would be for
>> gnucash to be able to run multiple simultaneous instances, each
>> instance working on a separate set of books.  This would make
>> switching from one set of books to another instantaneous, whilst
>> honouring all the other  valid constraints that we are told need to
>> be maintained.
>>
>> In any case, it seems to me that this whole question, the way it
>> keeps recurring, and the way it is always answered, is quite a good
>> example of the way that gnucash developers often see things from
>> their own perhaps slightly blinkered viewpoint (which is fine, so far
>> as it goes!) but fail to see that many gnucash users have different
>> and conflicting, but nontheless valid, viewpoints.
>>
>> Thus I would at least ask for a little more understanding of why
>> people who use gnucash so regularly ask about this, and for
>> acceptance of (and perhaps a little sympathy for!) the view that
>> despite the genuine reasons for not providing the facility requested,
>> as rehearsed in this thread and on each previous raising of the
>> question, for certain types of gnucash user those downsides would be
>> outweighed by some genuine real-world benefits were gnucash to work
>> as suggested.
>>
> Actually it is possible to keep more than one set of books open at the
> same time. In fact I do it all the time as I manage 3 small businesses
> with GnuCash.
>
> You can't do it via File->Open, but you can double-click on several
> data files in your OS's native file manager and the books will open
> next to each other.
>
> I wasn't there when the decision was made regarding File->Open
> automatically closing currently open books, but I guess the it was
> made based on the most frequent use case of that time: one person
> usually only manages one set of books. There were no business features
> then. This is obviously not the case for me or you.
>
> And yes, I think that it will indeed require quite some refactoring of
> the code before this can be changed. GnuCash assumes in many places
> there is only one book open at the time. My solution is a workaround,
> which works because it opens two completely independent instances of
> GnuCash. Each instances only sees one book.
>
> Geert
>
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A couple of questions about this scenario:

Isn't there only one set of user preferences?  What if the user changes
a preference in one instance.  Is it lost if another instance is the
last to be closed?

How about custom reports?  I think some preferences may be linked to the
filename, but I believe that many are not.

David C
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