[GNC] Fwd: The two modules

[Stephen M. Butler]

On 06/27/2018 04:41 PM, 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.

My wife is also an accountant and prefers that method also.  I setup my
books that way.  However, I'm trying to help Christopher with modifying
his version of the balance sheet to more fully meet my wife's
expectations (she likes the formatting of the eguile version but hates
the inclusion of the income statement within the equity portion of that
report.

<<snip>>
> 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).

This is a problem.  In a good report the parent with transactions should
show a line for the parent so that the column total for that parent (on
the balance sheet) is correct.

At least, as a former IT software development manager, I would insist
that a column total show all of it's inputs. 

Maybe the financial folks can band together to get the developers to
enforce no-transactions to a parent account.

<<snip>>
> Hope this helps make sense and helps you to get GnuCash working as you want
>
> Cheers
>
> David Cousens
>

Thanks David.  Except for the layout of the Balance Sheet and the Income
Statement reports, this has been working out great.

--Steve


Stephen M Butler, PMP, PSM
Stephen.M.Butler51 at gmail.com
kg7je at arrl.net
253-350-0166
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