[GNC] New Balsheet (and P&L report)

[DaveC49]

Christopher,

" except that Placeholder accounts 
can also contain transactions therefore must not necessarily accumulate 
their children account amounts. "

I have to disagree with the above from an accounting perspective.

If accounts are setup as Placeholders initially (i.e. the checkbox set in
New Account dialog when they are created) they are readonly hence you cannot
select them as targets for transactions (Placeholders do not appear in the
list of target accounts for a transaction and if you open the account
register you are warned that it is read only and you cannot enter
transactions from it so they cannot accumulate any balance when they are
initially set as Placeholder accounts.

If you change an existing account to be a Placeholder and it already has
transactions into it then its balance will contain the sum of those
transactions. If you then createa sub account of it and create transactions
into the sub-account, then the balance of the parent placeholder account
balance is correctly the sum of the balances of any sub accounts plus the
sum of any transactions into it before it was changed to a placeholder.

If it was initially a placeholder, a user could subsequently change it to be
a non-placeholder account  allowing it to accumulate transactions into it
and subsequently change it back.

In either of these two cases, the correct balance for the placeholder
account is always the balance of any transactions into the placeholder
account itself plus the sum of balances of it's sub-accounts. In most
accounting practice the balances of the subaccounts would be indented to the
right. 

To maintain consistency with this practice, if it is possible you could
present the balance of any direct transactions to the placeholder account
indented in the same manner as the sub-accounts as if it was a sub-account
and then have the non-indented balance for the placeholder account being the
sum of that plus the balances of any subaccounts.

Where you are trying to create a multicolumn/multiperiod type report, which
I have gathered is your objective, having to have indented sub-accounts will
make it very complex and difficult to fit on a fixed page size if you have
to preserve indenting of the sub-account structure. 

I would like to plead that the current Balance and Income Statements and
other standard accounting reports not be replaced by a multiperiod report,
but that this become an additional optional report.

Gnucash is used in many different jurisdictions not all of which have as yet
adopted the IFRS produced by the IASB. (The US while moving towards the IFRS
uses a GAAP which is not yet compliant). Even if this were the case, many
jurisdictions still have local divergences from strict IFRS adherence
because of the need to be consistent with other laws in their jurisdiction.
Having fairly plain vanilla single period reports which users can then
produce customised versions  for their specific requirements is fairly
essential to meet the need to operate across many jurisdictions, which is
one of GnuCash's strengths. That may be more difficult to do with a
multiperiod report.

A cautious user would hopefully not create the situation where placeholder
accounts have transactions into them, but Murphy's law applies and if it can
happen it no doubt will and does. 

The case where after a given date company or reporting policy requires a
more detailed breakdown with sub-accounts but prior to that date there was
only a single account is one situation where transactions to a parent
account might occur. I personally would treat that by creating a sub-account
for all transactions into the original account prior to that date to which
all existing transactions could be transferred along with the sub-accounts
for the future reporting structure for future transactions. At some point in
the future that sub-account with the original parent account transactions
could possibly be hidden, but the data is still preserved.

It would be ideal perhaps if Gnucash on creation of a subaccount required
the parent account to be made a placeholder and any existing transactions
transferred to either that subaccount (or another appropriate account) but
that is not built in currently. There may be other use cases where this is
not desirable however.

regards

David Cousens




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David Cousens
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