[GNC] totals for a parent account and all its children

[David Warren]

I certainly agree you shouldn't use gnucash (or any other double entry
bookkeeping system) without spending appropriate hours to learn
double-entry bookkeeping.
I also certainly agree that gnucash provides a *rich *set of reporting
tools, and that it is incumbent on the user (one can now use an LLM to
help!) to understand the types of things one might want to use a report to
do, and there are lots of good reasons to set up and then *save *reports
that will then be used repeatedly for circumstances the user understands.

Having said that, the sole method gnucash appears to allow for *account
selection *on saved reports is the user must *manually *select the accounts
one wants included in such reports.  If the user ever creates/adds a single
new account, that account will *not *be included in a saved report, at
least in my experience.  It would be completely *reasonable* for gnucash to
also allow users to specify some *logic *for which accounts should be
included in saved reports.  Complex logic would probably be quite difficult
to program, but logic as simple as checkboxes to include/exclude ALL
{income, expense, asset and/or liability} accounts, I am confident to say
would be *highly *utilized and appreciated by the gnucash user community.

On Sun, May 18, 2025 at 10:39 AM Michael or Penny Novack via gnucash-user <
gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

> > It would be very helpful if (and maybe there already is) there was a
> > place that would say what would be the usual or common options for the
> > reports.  For example, I think the transaction report should include
> > all the expense accounts.
> >
> > Just a bit of guidance would be incredibly helpful.
> >
> > I'm sure that there are other reports that would be helpful, but I
> > don't know if I should select everything, or just the asset accounts,
> > or the income accounts, or.... (and so on).
>
> Misunderstanding. Gnucash is a TOOL for partially automating double
> entry bookkeeping. In terms of how such systems are called, "general
> ledger"
>
> Take ANY Tool, say a hammer. The manual for a hammer might tell you what
> it is for (drive nails) and how to properly use it (grip, etc.). Out of
> scope for the hammer manual to teach you "what is a nail used for?" "why
> would I want to use a nail" etc.
>
> What you are needing is something along the lines of "what is double
> entry bookkeeping?" describing things like what are the usual reports,
> how are they formatted, etc. Things that  are NOT specific to gnucash.
> In other words, if we are talking about a report such as "Profit and
> Loss", what it looks like, what's included in it, etc. that is
> independent of how the double entry "general ledger" is kept. Thus the
> report ends up looking the same (same data in it) whether produced by
> gnucash or manually during the process of "closing the books" the books
> being pen and ink on paper (as it was when I learned ~65 years ago).
>
> Sorry, gnucash makes the work of double entry bookkeeping easier, but
> you still have to learn about double entry bookkeeping.
>
> Michael D Novack
>
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