[GNC] Investment Accounts

[David Cousens]

The totals for any account should reflect the totals of transactions to any
subaccounts + the total of transactions to the account itself. I am not
seeing any deviation from that behaviour in my personal  accounts for
superannuation funds which are also simply setup as asset accounts not as a
formal invsetment account ( V3.4 on Linux Mint Tara) or in general. 

Settings like Placeholder status shouldn't affect the totals, but
placeholder being set for example only prevents transactions to the account
once it is set as a placeholder. Any existing transactions are not
necessarily removed when the placeholder status is set.

That was really why i was asking about the parent account settings. This
will control where the account sums to. Not sure how the account type
affects summation into a parent account though. My experience is that the
New Account dialog restricts your choice of the account types based on the
setting of the parent account and it's type, but that that restriction may
still allow some choices which should not occur formally.

i haven't experimented a lot with what happens when you set an accounts type
before choosing the parent account which has an incompatible type for
example. But if you take a type Asset account and change its parent to an
account of type Liability, the account type of that account remains as Asset
and is not automatically changed to be a Liability account.  If it were to
be changed under such a change, you have to look carefully at how existing
transactions are handled and whether they should change.

That could have some interesting effects for summation into that Liability
account depending upon how GnuCash is actually programmed to handle that
situation. I haven't examined the code in that area but from an accounting
perspective, I would expect the following behavior. An asset account which
has a debit balance summing into a liability account which has a credit
balance should have its total subtracted from the total of the liability
account not added. I cannot think of a circumstance in formal accounting
where an asset account could or should be an subaccount of a liability
account or vice versa with similar restrictions on equity accounts, but
GnuCash does not seem to enforce any such restrictions formally in all
circumstances, at this time, particularly when the account type of an
account is changed when there are existing transcactions to that account.

David Cousens



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David Cousens
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