[GNC] Fwd: The two modules

[Christopher Lam]

Hi Dave

It's nice to have input from someone in the know.

I have used the placeholder flag to tag accounts which are now closed, 
e.g. closed bank accounts, loans paid off, old unused expense 
categories. This is not expressly disallowed by the UI, and the 
advantage here is the account does not appear on the transfer dialog.

The approach of the balsheet & profit&loss multicolumn report currently 
in development, is to ignore the placeholder flag, and allow 2 
strategies for parent/child subtotals. (These were also present in the 
old balance-sheet)

1. every parent account will automatically receive amounts from the 
children accounts, "recursive subtotal" e.g.

Asset $110,000 [the so-called placeholder acc]
Asset:Bank $2,000
Asset:Savings $8,000
Asset:House $100,000

I know some users will have subaccounts of their checking account for 
budgeting purposes, so,

Asset:Bank: $2000 [account-total is $1800 but also includes the child $200]
Asset:Bank:Budgeted $200

2. every account displays its own amounts, ignoring children accounts... 
however after each set parent+children, the whole group receives an 
overriding subtotal. "Hierarchical subtotal"

Asset $0
Asset:Bank $1,800
Asset:Bank:Budgeted $200
Total Asset:Bank $2,000

Asset:Savings $8,000
Asset:House $100,000
Total Asset $110,000

The balsheet (and P&L) report in development offers both, and is 
agnostic to the placeholder status. As a side effect, I've think that it 
makes for a good dashboard-view of your finances. See current output, in 
multicolumn in multicolumn.

https://screenshots.firefox.com/3AGgKiSkmdebjOsf/null

Left-column: profit&loss, with hierarchical subtotals
Middle-column: balance-sheet, with hierarchical subtotals
Right-column: balance-sheet, with recursive subtotals

C

On 28/06/18 07:41, DaveC49 wrote:
> Stephen,
>   
> As an accountant I would prefer to have parent accounts as placeholder
> accounts which cannot be the target of transactions directly (this can be
> set in the edit Account dialog and marks the account as read only) as the
> placeholder total should then be the sum of its active child accounts. This
> will give clean easy to read reports which make obvious sense.
>
> Before you convert an existing parent account to a placeholder (by checking
> the placeholder checkbox in the Edit Account dialog), you will need to
> transfer any transactions into it to an appropriate child/sub-account. My
> experience is that a placeholder account can have in turn child accounts
> which are also placeholders as well as child active accounts, which is OK
> and makes sense.
>
> An active non-placeholder account should not have child/subaccounts,
> although I don't think GnuCash actually prevents this. In this case, the
> parent account total is the sum of the child subaccount totals plus the sum
> of any transactions into the parent account itself. This will make a report
> look to be incorrect as the sum of transactions into the parent account is
> not presented separately and its total will not be the sum of the child
> account totals. I can't think of a use case where this would be desirable,
> but some people may be happy with that behavior. I don't think this behavior
> has changed since I first checked it out in an earlier version (around 2.2 I
> think).
>
> The report is a different beast but it should reflect the above behavior and
> a placeholder parent account should only show the total of its
> child/subaccounts totals. If it doesn't tha indicates that it may have
> already been the target of transactions when set as a placeholder and these
> were not transferred to a sub-account.
>
> If a parent account is not a placeholder account, it should behave as
> described above and add the total of any transactions into it to the sum of
> any child account totals. I haven't got time at the moment to check all the
> reports out but I have never noticed any problems with the Balance Sheet and
> Income Statement with all parent  accounts set as placeholders. There are
> enough accountants using GnuCash that this would have been picked up pretty
> quickly if it was not behaving as expected.
>
> Hope this helps make sense and helps you to get GnuCash working as you want
>
> Cheers
>
> David Cousens
>
>
>
>
>
> -----
> David Cousens
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