On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 12:25:45PM -0400, Martin Blais wrote: > One of the topics we've discussed in the past is regarding the use of > subaccounts over payees.
As a general comment: +1 on the fact that this divide between payees (or, more generally, per-posting metadata) and sub-accounts is a problem. I consider sub-accounts to be better in general (they are more controlled and easier to query), but they come with additional burden (e.g., you need to declare them, open/close them, etc.) Having to constantly decide "is this worth a sub-account" is for me recurringly annoying. > Another idea, one that we never discussed, is the idea to have a > special marker as part of the account name, marker which would > automatically identify a portion of an account name as being a leaf, > e.g., > > 2018-05-01 * "VISIT PATREON.COM/INSAN FRANCISCO CA" "OPSNT_CMEVT > 1234567890" > Liabilities:US:Amex -10.00 USD > Expenses:Online:Media/Safecast 3.00 USD > Expenses:Online:Media/AbroadInJapan 3.00 USD > Expenses:Online:Media/OnlyInJapan 2.00 USD I like the idea of having a given prefix of an account marked as something under which you can freely create new leaf sub-accounts. But why does it need an additional core concept and syntax? There might be advantages, which I'm not seeing yet, but the cost of doing so seems to be pretty high --- both in terms of code for the codebase and cognitive overhead for users. It seems to me that the same idea can be implemented, as you suggested earlier on, with a directive associate to the, in the example above, "Expenses:Online:Media" account, which says "this account can contain any number of leaf sub-accounts". Anyway, this is totally worth exploring, as it's an annoying problem in the current state of affairs. Thanks for raising this. Cheers -- Stefano Zacchiroli . [email protected] . upsilon.cc/zack _. ^ ._ Full professor of Computer Science o o o \/|V|\/ Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris o o o </> <\> Co-founder & CTO Software Heritage o o o o /\|^|/\ Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director '" V "' -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/20220727081845.bh7uwx7yyi5xgiea%40upsilon.cc.
