On Wed, Aug 7, 2013, at 1:02, John Wiegley wrote:
> >>>>> Martin Blais <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > Have you ever thought that Payees often end up functioning like an extra
> > subaccount?  I've come to realize that for Payees that only ever touch a
> > single account, the line is really fuzzy there.  I've been entertaining the
> > idea of automatically creating subaccounts for payees like that.  Any
> > thoughts?
> 
> Ledger 3 does support --account=payee, would that be close to what you mean?

I don't know. What does it do? I just spent 10 minutes leafing through the PDF 
doc for v3, I can't find it. There's an "--account NAME" option that says it 
prepends a string to all accounts (not what I meant). 

What I mean is that the last/leaf (not the first/root) component of an account 
could sometimes be automatically refined by one level, by appending the payee 
name as a subaccount.

An example is illustrative; the following input

  Transactions with payees "TMobile", "AT&T" and "Verizon"
  where one posting is always on "Expenses:Phone"

could be automatically converted into postings with accounts:

  Expenses:Phone:TMobile
  Expenses:Phone:ATT
  Expenses:Phone:Verizon

I'm not entirely sure yet what conditions would unambiguously qualify a payee's 
transactions to materialize into auto-generated sub-accounts, but it's worth 
considering. In my own bookkeeping, sometimes I use payee names, and sometimes 
I use subaccounts. The lines are blurred.

(Otherwise, the payees are only rendered, and used to generate "views" of all 
transactions where the payee appears.)

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