GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 657524
Display account codes in register and account selection popup
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:00:33 UTC
Original discussion in http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2011-August/032481.html A bit of background: in Austria where I live, most companies use an account hierarchy scheme which is hierarchically numbered, typically in 4-digit numbers. The numbering scheme is nationally standardized. I know a similar system exists in Germany, albeit with a set of industry specific account hierarchies (some of them available as GnuCash account hierarchy templates). I'm not sure about other European countries. Now, while GnuCash does allow for accounts to be assigned a number, those numbers are not available to actually be selected in the register when making an entry. That complicates matters for users using a numbered accounting scheme -- specifically because, as the account number identifies the account unequivocally, the account hierarchy scheme does not enforce uniqueness among leaf account names. In GnuCash, this problem can be worked around by referring to accounts by their full name (as opposed to just the leaf account names) -- but that's comparatively tedious, compared to identifying an account by its number. Some existing account hierarchies (in the de_DE locale) presently work around this limitation rather crudely, by including the account number as a prefix to the account name. Apart from that being a rather inelegant redundancy, it also creates a suboptimal user experience: GnuCash displays account names right-aligned in the register -- so for long account names, even if the "only display leaf account names" option is checked, the account number is often invisible. Thus, my suggestion is to add an option to display account codes in the register and account selection dialog. Then, if said option is checked, the account selection dropdown would display account numbers and enable users to quickly select an account by typing 3-4 numeric keys. Going down the rabbit hole, it would of course make sense to optionally include the account numbers in reports too -- but I believe this is safe to defer until after the basic functionality exists
Following suggestions in the original mailing list thread, I have set up a branch tracking patches implementing the suggested functionality: https://github.com/fghaas/gnucash/tree/bugzilla-657524 This will occasionally be rebased on trunk if and when work progresses.
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