[GNC] The two modules

[John Ralls]

David T:

No, he didn’t. He said that it’s poor accounting practice and since unlike you and me he’s a licensed accountant we should respect his judgement. He also said explicitly that GnuCash doesn’t enforce that and he correctly described how GnuCash handles placeholder accounts having transactions.

Regards,
John Ralls


> On Jun 28, 2018, at 6:39 AM, D via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----
> David Cousens
> --
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