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

[David Carlson]

On 1/1/2015 12:03 PM, Sébastien de Menten wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Patrick Doyle <wpdster at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Mike or Penny Novack
>> <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
>>> On 1/1/2015 10:03 AM, Patrick Doyle wrote:
>>>> 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.
>> Hi Michael,
>> Thank you for the feedback.  It wasn't clear to me that using income
>> and expense accounts would do what I wanted.  It wasn't clear to me
>> 25(ish) years ago when I first set up my accounting system with
>> Quicken, and it still isn't clear to me now.  (I mentioned in my
>> previous post that I'm something of an "Old Dog" and have trouble with
>> "new tricks" :-))
>>
>> The system I've used for the past 25 years looks like this:
>> When I receive money, it goes into buckets.  Reading the internet
>> lately, I've discovered that I'm not the first person to come up with
>> this idea, except that others call them "envelopes", which is funny,
>> because I learned the system from watching my parents put money into
>> (and take money out of) envelopes when they bought a house in 1981.
>>
>> Hello Patrick,
> When you first described your system, I thought about the following
> solution:
> - on the asset side, you create an account called "Current Account" (I
> suppose that's where your "income" money goes) with as many sub accounts as
> you have buckets. So you would have something like
> Asset / Current Account
> Asset / Current Account / Food
> Asset / Current Account / Car
> ...
> The Current Account would be just a placeholder account where you do not
> use in transaction. Nevertheless, it allows you to have the aggregated view
> on all your buckets (ie sub-accounts) as it can sum up the balance of all
> sub-accounts.
>
> - when you receive your income, you would post the following
> transaction/splits
> Income : Salary  = 1000
> Asset / Current Account / Food = 200
> Asset / Current Account / Car = 100
> etc (so that sum of buckets = 1000)
>
> - when you spend money on Food, you would post the following
> transaction/splits
> Asset / Current Account / Food = -50
> Expense / Food = 50
>
> If instead of a "current account", you would get the income in cash you
> could just replace all "current account" by "cash" and your buckets could
> almost be seen as real "cash enveloppes".
>
> Would this work ?
>
> kr
>
> sebastien
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I will suggest another way to "build that bridge" that is sometimes used
in engineering...
Develop the new model in parallel with the old model, operating both
side-by-side for a period of time.  Since you say that you need to
modify your old file before it can be imported into the new, use a
backup to start a temporary file just for those modifications separate
from your old file.  Actually, you may want to keep some modifications
in your old file, so do those before the split.
There is a lot of duplicate work to enter new data into both models, so
plan a target date to end one or the other.

David C