How difficult is it (really) to reorganize a Chart-of-Accounts after the fact?

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 1/1/2015 10:03 AM, Patrick Doyle wrote:
> Happy New Year!
>
> .....
> But what happens if, sometime in March or so, after I've used GNUCash
> for a while, I decide that I really should have organized my chart of
> accounts slightly (or even significantly) differently?

  You can create new account, change what their parents are (rearrange 
tree), etc.

>
> I mentioned in a previous post (and got some fabulous feedback --
> thank you very much Lance & John!) that I'm planning on using a bunch
> of Equity subaccounts to track the "buckets" (or "envelopes") into
> which I add and withdraw money as I get or spend it.
OOPS -- this and what follows suggests that you should perhaps reread 
the introductory material describing (modern) double entry bookkeeping. 
If you were back many hundreds of years ago in the early days of double 
entry bookkeeping that is more or less what would be done (without the 
sub buckets -- we'll come back to that). Income and expense transactions 
were immediately recorded against equity (the other side of the 
transaction). That meant that while the net equity was always quickly 
known there was no easy way to see what the income and expenses 
categories came to since entries were in date order, like income or like 
expense transactions not grouped together.

So, somebody came up with the clever idea of having TEMPORARY accounts 
of type "income" and "expense" which are actually of real type "equity". 
Every so often the totals of these accounts would be transferred to 
another special account called "profit and loss" (also fundamental type 
equity) and that closed with the net gain or loss to equity. So at the 
end of the accounting period, the balances of all the (temporary) income 
and expense accounts would be zero as well as the net balance of the 
"profit and loss" account. That was meant by "closing the books" ---only 
the permanent standing accounts remain with non-zero balances.

In other words, the modern way would be for you to use accounts of type 
"income" and "expense" instead of you buckets under equity. Though it is 
interesting to see you sort of "reinventing the wheel" with a slightly 
different solution (but related) than what was as come up with lo those 
hundreds of years ago. Gnucash and other computerized systems can 
produce the reports you need without actually doing a "close the books" 
operation but that is offered as an option for those who want to stick 
closer to the old fashioned way.

Michael D Novack