Top level account without any type (or file links)

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 16 May 2012 12:37:51 -0600 Stuart McGraw <smcg4191 at frii.com> wrote:

> 
> On 05/16/2012 11:03 AM, David Carlson wrote:
> > 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.
> >>[...]
> >> 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.
> >>[...]
> >
> > 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?
> 
> It appears from a quick test I jut did, that if you change the 
> preferences in one instance of Gnucash, the preference will 
> immediately change in the other instance as well.  So closing 
> order does not matter. 
> 
> Of course this implies there is only one set of user preferences 
> that will apply to all open instances of Gnucash but that it a 
> fairly common state of affairs -- my preferred media player (VLC)
> has only one set of user preferences no matter how many instances 
> of it I open.

The preferences don't seem to be at all related to the book(s) or
accounts and only relate to a given persons 'work flow' and what not. It
would seem 'weird' to me if one person wanted to difference work
preferences when working with different sets of books.  A symptom of MPD
maybe? :-)

> 
> > How about custom reports?  I think some preferences may be linked to the
> > filename, but I believe that many are not.
> 
> Custom reports seem to be a per-user item and the same set of
> custom reports appear in all open (by the same user) Gnucash 
> instances.

I expect that generally, custom reports are really similar to the
preferences in many ways: I would guess there are certain sorts of
relationships between similar sorts of accounts.  I would thus expect
that (unless the various sets of books were for wildly different sorts
of activities), that you'd probably want the same sorts of reports for
each set of books, much like the standard reports all behave much the
same for any given set of books.  After all, the custom reports are
generally just tweaked versions of the standard reports.

To me, this really makes perfect sense.

If the books (and how you are managing them) are really that radically
different, it might make sense to create separate user (computer)
accounts, one for each set of books.  ALL current, modern operating
systems support this (yes, even MS-Windows and MacOSX), even if many
home/personal users don't actually bother to make use of such features.
And even though using such features is an excellent basic security
measure besides.

> 
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>                                             

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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