John, I agree with you that making the accounts with child accounts have no transactions is being unnecessarily restrictive and may not meet all possible use cases but perhaps having the option of being able to restrict it to that case if it suits an individual's purpose is a suitable compromise. The other thing may be to issue a warning when you have made an account with transactions a Placeholder account and that you may want to transfer those transactions to a subaccount or another account entirely. At the moment, I think it simply flags that you have made the account read-only.
I don't find the name Placeholder accounts too undescriptive of the function of providing a higher level grouping of accounts with some commanality of purpose/function. Adding an additional option to be able to in addition make placeholder accounts strictly Placeholder (i.e. unable to accept transactions into them) would be one way to go which would retain that flexibility for those who have a need for Placholder accounts to be a target for transactions. I personally can live with it as it is now and impose my own rules on my usage for placeholders not to have transactions into them and just take appropriate action to transfer existing transactions if you change an account to a placeholder account. Perhaps all that is necessary is really to highlight the implications of making an account a placeholder in the documentation/guide, perhaps in the section of setting up the CoA. i haven't read that for several yers now so i might check it out. In either case, any reports have to be able to cope with the cases where a placeholder account does have transactions directly into it or does no,t in an appropriate manner. My personal preference would be for If a parent has transactions put it twice: Once as aggregate account and once as an account on it's own. That would meet both needs. The aggregate will total it's own transactions with those of its child accounts. Or put differently the aggregate account would treat itself as a child account. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ 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.