Filtered account report

[AC]

On 2018-01-16 05:48, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> 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 .........
>

Yes except that's not how things started or ended up.  Many of the
transactions are from before GnuCash so they are historical records that
imported that way.  Second, I really wasn't paying attention to the
interest in any way other than to record it for record keeping as part
of a transaction mainly because I was more interested in the portion of
the payment that went to the principal and tracking the remaining amount
of payoff.

There were already over 500 transactions at the time I imported into
GnuCash for the first time.  So it's a bit off base to suggest I should
have "paid attention" when setting up the CoA when I didn't have a CoA
due to the original software.  I was lucky enough to get it to import
with few errors as is.

However, I was able to do it anyway without modifying the account
structure.  I just dumped the table and parsed it externally.