That was an excellent answer, and explains clearly a big reason why users should strive to limit their transactions to leaf nodes in the account hierarchy. (My own books include numerous violations of this premise, BTW) Gnucash has always allowed users to put transactions in intermediate level accounts, which some in the community have felt was Not Good, although I've been a little more equivocal about it. I'm not sure, but there may be an outstanding bug request on the behavior.
Not a bug but a user choice. In other words, gnucash leaves it up to the user to decide if an "intermediate" (non-leaf) account is allowed to have transactions entered into it. That is an account by account decision. When you create the account (or any time thereafter) you can make it a "placeholder" account and so not allowed to have transactions entered into it.
So ....... if you feel it is "not good" to allow accidental (or intentional) placing of a transaction into a non-leaf account, just make all non-leaf accounts "placeholder".
Personally, I do not do this, especially in my low volume books. I expect I would see (and then get a chance to correct) any accidents the next time I produced reports and such accidents are rare.
But I sometimes intentionally do this as a temporary emergency measure in the middle of entering transactions. If it is JUST "no existing leaf quite fits" I might just create the new leaf on the fly. But usually I can see that IF (once) this new leaf account exists, then some of the transactions now in a pre-existing sibling leaf really would be better placed in this new leaf << they weren't THAT much "not-fitting" before to justify creating a separate account for them but IF that separate account existed, that's where they should go >> In other words, do not want to interrupt the work flow of entering transactions to deal with this more or less substantial bit of work.
Us your judgement here. If you find you ARE making mistakes, you probably would be better off making all non-leaf accounts "placeholder".
Michael D Novack _______________________________________________ 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.
