[GNC] Fwd: The two modules

D sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 28 09:39:09 EDT 2018


David,

You've now misstated twice that Placeholder accounts cannot have transactions, and I feel it is important to make it unambiguously clear to anyone reading this thread that there is nothing in Gnucash that prevents placeholder accounts from having transactions. 

Setting an account as a placeholder only prevents further transactions from being added to that account. Many of us use the placeholder setting to prevent accidental creation of transactions in closed accounts, for example.I

David T.

On June 28, 2018, at 4:58 AM, DaveC49 <davidcousens at bigpond.com> 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





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David Cousens
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