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

[Tommy Trussell]

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 2:26 PM sunfish62--- via gnucash-user <
gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:

> Selecting accounts in even a moderately complex set of books can be
> tedious and error-prone. Add in the fact that new accounts in a tree that
> was previously fully selected won't get added automatically,
>

I'm tossing in my agreement in with this -- I keep the books for a small
nonprofit, and in order to make short work of our annual tax letters, I
create a separate account for each donor.
Income:Contributions:Persons:LastName1  ...LastName2 ...LastName3 etc.

AS A CONSEQUENCE, about a third of my monthly saved reports in GnuCash have
an annotation to me in the report name -- "Select Children" -- to remind me
to go into the report configuration every month, click the accounts, click
the "select chlidren" button and then save the report definition. Whenever
a new person gives to the organization, I create an account, but if I
forget to redefine the reports, I can miss seeing that person's
contributions. Fortunately for me, it's easy to see the un-selected
accounts in the report's account selector, so once I open the account
selector, I don't have to guess if I've missed any.

It would be really great if I could define reports INCLUDING a permanent
"select children" designation for a top level account.

If another report has the inverse (all accounts are selected by default and
the report allows me to persistently turn off details of accounts I DON'T
want to see), that would work, too. I cannot think of a GnuCash report that
works that way, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

P.S.: Yes, I know there are OTHER ways to record the books without creating
a separate account for each person, but after a few experiments a few years
ago, I chose that strategy. I plan to advise my successor in the pros and
cons of that choice, and that person may choose to redo the books
differently.


> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>