I didn’t maintain sub-accounts (I call them “commodity leaf” accounts) for 
a long time, but beangrow <https://github.com/beancount/beangrow> made me 
switch, as it makes it possible to drill down into performance. If you use 
Fava, it also makes dividends/gains income tracking easier, as account 
hierarchies are readily represented by standard UI elements, but query 
results aren’t (and can't easily be).

I use my opengroup plugin 
<https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/main/beancount_reds_plugins/opengroup#readme>
 
to make open directives easier. Beancount now supports closing an entire 
tree.

I use my setup for taxes regularly 
<https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/computing-taxes-with-beancount/>
 
but haven’t found the need to propagate metadata down the tree of open 
directives. Curious, what is causing that need for you?

You could write a trivial plugin to dynamically coalesce commodity-leaf 
accounts to their parent, and use that to evaluate if that works for you 
before committing to it.
​

On Wednesday, May 22, 2024 at 5:30:10 PM UTC-7 [email protected] wrote:

> Do you use sub-accounts for individual stocks? Why?
>
> I do because I found it more deterministic to balance and close accounts, 
> but I've always thought the explicit open/close directives were redundant 
> with lot tracking. Else why not go all out with `Broker:GOOG-2024-03-02`?
>
> Now I'm starting to use more queries and metadata (coming from basic fava 
> usage), and am not looking forward to finding and maintaining the meta on 
> each individual open directive. I'm considering opening a parent account 
> and filtering using coalesce:
>
>     2024-01-01 open Assets:IRA
>         tax-status: "Deferred"
>     2024-01-01 close Assets:IRA ; Or maybe use for USD/fiat
>     2024-01-01 open Assets:IRA:GOOG  GOOG
>
> Then I think I could get the meta like so:
>
>     coalesce(getitem(open_meta(account), 'tax-status'), 
> getitem(open_meta(parent(account)), 'tax-status'))
>
> ... But this seems like a hack, so I'm wondering if it really makes sense 
> to keep the sub-accounts. Alternatively, this complete balance assertion 
> <https://beancount.github.io/docs/balance_assertions_in_beancount.html#partial-vs.-complete-assertions>
>  
> proposal looks perfect for my concerns about balance tracking.
>
> What else would I miss by simplifying to multi-currency accounts?

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