[GNC] Change account type by editing XML?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Having more than one account of type A/R or A/P might cause problems. They are special types used just for the business features. Manual entries should be normal asset and liability accounts but they can be children of the special A/R and A/P types.

If editing the XML directly is an issue, perhaps there is another way:

1. Export the transactions from those accounts.
2. Edit the resulting CSV as needed with the new account names (may not be necessary if you just want to change type and/or location in the tree)
3. Delete the existing accounts *and* their transactions.
4. Create the new accounts properly.
5. Import the CSVs, mapping the transactions to the new accounts.

Of course, that’s still lots of GUI clicking, but might be an option if directly editing the file is an issue, since you can’t get GnuCash to move the transactions for you.

I think there was a bug or list thread on this issue of moving A/R transactions to non A/R accounts now that I recall, and it may be that this was the fix or the original reasoning behind this limitation. (what happens to the business features if you were to do that with the main A/R or A/P accounts?)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 29, 2020 w18d120, at 3:43 PM, david whiting <dw at davidwhiting.me.uk> wrote:
> 
> I'm hoping that directly editing the XML file will be the way to do it
> because I have close to 1,000 accounts to move and doing them all by
> clicking through the gui is not something I'm looking forward to (it's
> why I haven't done it yet, having realised a year or so ago that they
> are in the wrong place). I'm going to sleep on it and over the next
> day or so I'll look more carefully at the XML file, see how the IDs
> relate to each other etc. to see if there is any difference between
> ASSETs and RECEIVABLEs in terms of how the data are stored.
> 
> David