On 2018-01-16 05:48, Mike or Penny Novack wrote: > On 1/16/2018 3:04 AM, AC wrote: >> Thanks but not exactly simple in my case as there are over 1000 >> transactions to the loan interest expense account. The report was >> mainly for my own curiosity which is why I'd rather use an algorithmic >> method to generate the report. > This is an important point (what David just said) > > With any of these accounting packages you have to plan the CoA so that > the information you need will be available. Essentially what you are > saying is: > > "I did not design the CoA in such a way (a parent "loan interest" under > which children "loan 1 interest", "loan 2 interest", ......) that I > could see the interest for each loan separately. How can I NOW obtain > that information?" > > The simple answer is, you can't. But that leads to a discussion about > being alert to changes needed in our books. Such changes might be easy > at the time but very difficult later. Using this situation as an > example, you might have started out with just one loan, so natural to > have just "loan interest". It is when first entering transactions > related to a second loan that we need to notice "oops, won't be able to > track the interest of the two loans separately" and so you: > 1) rename "loan interest" to "loan 1 interest" > 2) create parent account (placeholder) "loan interest" > 3) make "loan 1 interest" a child of this account. > 4) create "loan 2 interest" a child of this account. > If you realized this fairly speedily after loan 2 came into existence, > not a lot of work re-entering transactions. But if you wait till there > are hundreds or thousands that would need to be fixed ......... >
Yes except that's not how things started or ended up. Many of the transactions are from before GnuCash so they are historical records that imported that way. Second, I really wasn't paying attention to the interest in any way other than to record it for record keeping as part of a transaction mainly because I was more interested in the portion of the payment that went to the principal and tracking the remaining amount of payoff. There were already over 500 transactions at the time I imported into GnuCash for the first time. So it's a bit off base to suggest I should have "paid attention" when setting up the CoA when I didn't have a CoA due to the original software. I was lucky enough to get it to import with few errors as is. However, I was able to do it anyway without modifying the account structure. I just dumped the table and parsed it externally. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.