[GNC] Bulk moving transactions

[D.]

Ah. I misread your original post. Having used GnuCash for over 15 years now, I am quite familiar with editing accounts, thank you. 

Still, editing a bunch of accounts seems like more complication than just editing the transactions themselves. I guess I assume that because a month of credit card transactions for me is something like 20 transactions total. 

Best. 


-------- Original Message --------
From: Michael or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at comcast.net>
Sent: Wed Jul 01 22:20:08 EDT 2020
To: "D." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Matthew Forbis via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Bulk moving transactions

On 7/1/2020 6:30 PM, D. wrote:
> Of course, once you've edited every transaction to put it into a child account, you could have just changed them all to their proper account altogether, and eliminated the entire account delete set of steps...
>
??????   I wasn't talking about editing ANY transactions (or putting 
them in a child account)

I was talking about editing ACCOUNTS. I suspect that perhaps you have 
not edited accounts, changed their names or descriptions, changed what 
their parent was (move in the CoA) etc.

If you have transactions in an account that do not belong there (and no 
transactions that do belong there) and these transactions all should be 
in some different account you CAN "block move" them to that other 
account. You do this by trying to delete the account and when gnucash 
asks what you want done with the transactions (delete or move to another 
account) you select the move option. BUT if that first account has 
children, you have to first move the children elsewhere. You do that not 
by moving the transactions in these accounts but by respecifying what 
account is the parent.

I am frequently adding accounts to my CoAs, adding parent accounts, 
making existing accounts children, etc.

Michael D Novack

PS --- I will give an example. Let's say you have an account "automobile 
expenses" as a parent that has under it things like "fuel", "repairs", 
etc. You now get a second car. What to do? Well I would:

1) create new accounts "auto1 expenses" and "auto2 expenses" and make 
them children of "automobile expenses"

2) edit each of the existing children "fuel", "repairs", etc. changing 
their parent from "automobile expenses" to "auto1 expenses".

3) create new "fuel", "repairs", etc. as children of "auto2 expenses".

<< notice -- no moving of transactions was involved but those expenses 
related to auto 1 are where they belong >>