Moving Accounts Around.

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Fri Aug 26 04:41:02 EDT 2016


On Thursday 25 August 2016 22:57:36 fellowtraveler at comcast.net wrote:
> Thanks all for the help with the Lot Links, I am taking a look at
> that; it’s a shame there isn’t an easier way to look at those
> relationships. Anyway, I have another issue that has cropped up
> hopefully the community knows a solution.
> 
> I am working on re-ordering the accounts I am maintaining. I was told
> that to move entries to a new account I could simply delete the
> entries and I would be given the opportunity to select a destination
> for the entries in the account I was deleting. This worked well for
> most accounts however I ran into some accounts that have entries
> linked to invoices, when I try to delete them I get the following
> error message:
> 
> The list below shows objects which make use of the account which you
> want to delete.\nBefore you can delete it, you must either delete
> those objects or else modify them so they make use\nof another
> account. Printed in a dialog box which can only be acknowledged. So
> is there anyway around this? I’d prefer not to have to open up and
> adjust each individual invoice. Any suggestions? Thanks. :)

What do you want to achieve exactly ?

For "moving accounts around" you could also edit the account properties 
from the Account Hierarchy page. There you can rename the account and 
choose a different parent account. That seems more straightforward to me 
than deleting the account. And this will work equally well for A/R and 
A/P accounts

However if you want to merge two accounts the only option is to delete 
one account and select the other one to move all the splits from the old 
account to. And indeed this won't work for A/R and A/P accounts because 
the transactions in there are protected for technical reasons. If you 
really want to merge multiple A/R or A/P accounts you will need to 
manually move each transaction. Unfortunately this is cumbersome:

- first unpost each invoice and repost it to the new account. This will 
lose all links between these invoices and their payments.
- then you can delete the old account and move the payments still in 
there in one go
- finally you'll have to invoke "Assign as payment" on each of the 
payments that were moved to the new account to restore the links between 
the moved invoices and the moved payments.

Good luck!

Geert



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list