[GNC] Expense Over Time report

[Michael or Penny Novack]

> That was an excellent answer, and explains clearly a big reason why users should strive to limit their transactions to leaf nodes in the account hierarchy. (My own books include numerous violations of this premise, BTW) Gnucash has always allowed users to put transactions in intermediate level accounts, which some in the community have felt was Not Good, although I've been a little more equivocal about it. I'm not sure, but there may be an outstanding bug request on the behavior.

Not a bug but a user choice. In other words, gnucash leaves it up to the 
user to decide if an "intermediate" (non-leaf) account is allowed to 
have transactions entered into it. That is an account by account 
decision. When you create the account (or any time thereafter) you can 
make it a "placeholder" account  and so not allowed to have transactions 
entered into it.

So ....... if you feel it is "not good" to allow accidental (or 
intentional) placing of a transaction into a non-leaf account, just make 
all non-leaf accounts "placeholder".

Personally, I do not do this, especially in my low volume books. I 
expect I would see (and then get a chance to correct) any accidents the 
next time I produced  reports and such accidents are rare.

But I sometimes intentionally do this as a temporary emergency measure  
in the middle of entering transactions. If it is JUST "no existing leaf 
quite fits" I might just create the new leaf on the fly. But usually I 
can see that IF (once) this new leaf account exists, then some of the 
transactions now in a pre-existing sibling leaf really would be better 
placed in this new leaf << they weren't THAT much "not-fitting" before 
to justify creating a separate account for them but IF that separate 
account existed, that's where they should go >>  In other words, do not 
want to interrupt the work flow of entering transactions to deal with 
this more or less substantial bit of work.

Us your judgement here. If you find you ARE making mistakes, you 
probably would be better off making all non-leaf accounts "placeholder".

Michael D Novack