categorized monthly expense reports?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Elmar,

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but why the need to create placeholders for reporting purposes?

I would tackle this problem thus:

Set up an expense report using just the accounts that are of fixed type. (no need to have a fixed parent, just include the ones you want)
Save the report configuration as “Fixed Expense Report”

Do the same for each of the other types.

Run the reports as needed, adjusting the period dates as necessary.

Next time you run say the “Discretionary” report, only those accounts you included as discretionary when you saved the configuration will be part of it.

Now, if you want to run a consolidated report and show ‘fixed’ ‘variable’ and ‘discretionary’ as separate line items then yes, you’ll need to create parent accounts or export a full report to a spreadsheet and manipulate it there.

-Adrien


> On Mar 1, 2017, at 4:55 PM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
> 
> From: Elmar <eschmeisser at nc.rr.com <mailto:eschmeisser at nc.rr.com>>
> Subject: categorized monthly expense reports?
> Date: March 1, 2017 at 2:29:12 PM CST
> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>>
> 
> 
> Good afternoon to the list
> 
> I am trying to set up 3 expense reports:  fixed expenses, variable expenses and discretionary expenses.  Into each of these I want to place some of the categories/accounts under the expenses tab.  But I see no way to create these "super-categories" other than creating them in the basic list of accounts, i.e. not just one account labeled "expenses" (placeholder account, with subaccounts under it), but 3 separate placeholder accounts.  Have I parsed this correctly?
> 
> - Elmar