David, You've now misstated twice that Placeholder accounts cannot have transactions, and I feel it is important to make it unambiguously clear to anyone reading this thread that there is nothing in Gnucash that prevents placeholder accounts from having transactions.
Setting an account as a placeholder only prevents further transactions from being added to that account. Many of us use the placeholder setting to prevent accidental creation of transactions in closed accounts, for example.I David T. On June 28, 2018, at 4:58 AM, DaveC49 <davidcous...@bigpond.com> wrote: Stephen, As an accountant I would prefer to have parent accounts as placeholder accounts which cannot be the target of transactions directly (this can be set in the edit Account dialog and marks the account as read only) as the placeholder total should then be the sum of its active child accounts. This will give clean easy to read reports which make obvious sense. Before you convert an existing parent account to a placeholder (by checking the placeholder checkbox in the Edit Account dialog), you will need to transfer any transactions into it to an appropriate child/sub-account. My experience is that a placeholder account can have in turn child accounts which are also placeholders as well as child active accounts, which is OK and makes sense. An active non-placeholder account should not have child/subaccounts, although I don't think GnuCash actually prevents this. In this case, the parent account total is the sum of the child subaccount totals plus the sum of any transactions into the parent account itself. This will make a report look to be incorrect as the sum of transactions into the parent account is not presented separately and its total will not be the sum of the child account totals. I can't think of a use case where this would be desirable, but some people may be happy with that behavior. I don't think this behavior has changed since I first checked it out in an earlier version (around 2.2 I think). The report is a different beast but it should reflect the above behavior and a placeholder parent account should only show the total of its child/subaccounts totals. If it doesn't tha indicates that it may have already been the target of transactions when set as a placeholder and these were not transferred to a sub-account. If a parent account is not a placeholder account, it should behave as described above and add the total of any transactions into it to the sum of any child account totals. I haven't got time at the moment to check all the reports out but I have never noticed any problems with the Balance Sheet and Income Statement with all parent accounts set as placeholders. There are enough accountants using GnuCash that this would have been picked up pretty quickly if it was not behaving as expected. Hope this helps make sense and helps you to get GnuCash working as you want Cheers David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
