Filtered account report

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 1/16/2018 3:04 AM, AC wrote:
> Thanks but not exactly simple in my case as there are over 1000
> transactions to the loan interest expense account.  The report was
> mainly for my own curiosity which is why I'd rather use an algorithmic
> method to generate the report.
This is an important point (what David just said)

With any of these accounting packages you have to plan the CoA so that 
the information you need will be available. Essentially what you are 
saying is:

"I did not design the CoA in such a way (a parent "loan interest" under 
which children "loan 1 interest", "loan 2 interest", ......) that I 
could see the interest for each loan separately. How can I NOW obtain 
that information?"

The simple answer is, you can't. But that leads to a discussion about 
being alert to changes needed in our books. Such changes might be easy 
at the time but very difficult later. Using this situation as an 
example, you might have started out with just one loan, so natural to 
have just "loan interest". It is when first entering transactions 
related to a second loan that we need to notice "oops, won't be able to 
track the interest of the two loans separately" and so you:
1) rename "loan interest" to "loan 1 interest"
2) create parent account (placeholder) "loan interest"
3) make "loan 1 interest" a child of this account.
4) create "loan 2 interest" a child of this account.
If you realized this fairly speedily after loan 2 came into existence, 
not a lot of work re-entering transactions. But if you wait till there 
are hundreds or thousands that would need to be fixed .........

Michael D Novack