[GNC] Deleting an account

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 5/20/2022 4:07 PM, Gyle McCollam wrote:
> I had a Parent Account:  Bank Name, with Subaccounts  Bank Name:Checking,  and Bank Name:Special Checking.  I wanted to eliminate the subaccounts and end up with only the Parent account.
>
>
>    1.  I changed the Parent account Bank Name from a placeholder account to a regular account.
>    2.  I deleted Bank Name: Checking and moved all the transactions to Bank Name.  A dialogue box explained what I was about to do and asked if I sure I want ed to do this.  It gave me the choices of "Cancel" and "Delete".  That was slightly confusing, it would have been better if it was "No" and "Yes", even "No/ Cancel" and "Yes/Delete" would be more clear.
>    3.  There were "Scheduled Transactions" (ST), involving the subaccount.  It displayed the 10 ST and asked if I wanted to edit them.  I thought this was a REALLY GREAT feature and was thankful that it checked ST to see if they were affected.  However, I would be even better if it had substituted the account the transactions were moved to for the account that was deleted instead of just removing the deleted account (it leaves the associated split, which is also great).  That way the account could just be accepted without editing or edited only if need be.


Describe in words, WHAT were you trying to do? You had two accounts at 
the bank, "regular checking" and "special checking" and in gnucash you 
had accounts for these these as children of a parent "bank name". How 
did you want to end up? << was "special checking" to be a child of 
"regular checking" or a sibling? >> Is that description correct for what 
you were trying to accomplish?

In NEITHER case would you have to delete an account that had 
transactions in it (and scheduled transactions, to boot) << the parent 
"bank name" was a placeholder >> You simply alter the parent 
specifications of "regular checking" and "special checking" so that 
"bank name" is no longer their parent, delete the ex-parent "bank name", 
rename "regular checking" to "bank name", and if you want "special 
checking" to be a child instead of a sibling, specify its parent to be 
whatever name you have for that regular checking account.

A useful hint for everybody. Sometimes you want an account to end up 
with an account name still in use (at the moment, you are in the middle 
of restructuring your CoA). Don't stop thinking you need to do things in 
s special order. Just do the rename to a temporary name (like "qqq'"; 
you know THAT name is not in use) and then later in the process when the 
name you wanted to end up is available, you rename "qqq" to what you 
wanted to to be. << this advice of course is not just about gnucash; 
more generally useful when doing a sequence of renames >>

Michael D Novack