For whatever it's worth, I have encountered a similar situation a few times 
(sometimes with Expense accounts, sometimes with brokerage sub-accounts for 
specific investments which I close out a position but then buy it again at 
some later date). In each case, I shared the same hesitance about modifying 
history to remove a previous account closure. If its not a pain, I do think 
it would provide value to be able to re-open closed accounts.

-Aaron

On Saturday, January 15, 2022 at 10:52:39 PM UTC-5 [email protected] wrote:

> Similar thoughts as you (same analysis).
> The complication with allowing reopening is that code that uses those 
> directives would have to be changed to support that.
> Or perhaps the getters.py routine changes to return the (first-open, 
> last-close).
> Meh.
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 15, 2022 at 10:15 PM Justus Pendleton <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>
>> This is admittedly a fairly trivial edge case with an easy workaround but 
>> given that v3 is under development, I figured I'd bring it up.
>>
>> Right now beancount doesn't allow you to close an account and then reopen 
>> it. (Only one open directive is allowed.) Should it?
>>
>> This is the scenario I ran into today:
>>
>> Several years ago I bought a house. So I closed the account 
>> Expenses:Rent. Now we are renovating the house and need to rent another 
>> place for a few months. So I need to re-open Expenses:Rent.
>>
>> Sure, I could go back and just delete the close transaction from 2017 but 
>> that feels weird. Like I'm editing history. Also being able to have the 
>> account closed from 2017-2022 feels "right", in that there shouldn't be any 
>> transaction going to that account during that time period.
>>
>> Alternatively, one could argue that the entire concept of "closing" 
>> doesn't really apply to Income/Expenses and is really just a bit of an 
>> implementation artifact since beancount doesn't have any real inherent 
>> semantics for accounts.
>>
>> Does anyone else have thoughts or opinions on this?
>>
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