GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 769256
Change New Account Dialog
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:50:08 UTC
There have been a number of threads on the user list in which users have had difficulties setting up accounts for equities and mutual funds. These users have not been able to set the Security/Currency to an appropriate value because the account type had not yet been correctly set. The New Account dialog contributes to this problem by the sequence of fields in the dialog, which does not match the required sequence of input. The user must correctly set the Account Type field (located at the bottom of the dialog) *BEFORE* they can correctly set the Security/currency field in the middle. Not only is this sequence confusing to new users, it is an annoyance for experienced users as well, since the user must manually relocate to the type field, set the type, and then manually relocate back to the currency field to set it. This quickly gets burdensome. At the very least, I would suggest that it would be much clearer and easier to have the Account Type field placed immediately after the Description field, and that it be changed to a drop down list. This would make it clearer to new users and more efficient for others, without entailing a great deal of change to the program.
Created pull request https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs/pull/55 to document in the Guide that when adding a new stock account, you need to select Account Type before trying to select/add Security. The commits in this pull request reference https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115461 as this bug was added subsequently.
The logical order would be: 1. Parent account 2. Account type, depends on parent account 3. Account name and the rest of the dialog
Frank-- Good point. Do you recommend that the Parent Account field be a drop down list as well? It seems to me that this would be best. David
David, the easiest way would be to just reorder the boxes of the dialog. But using drop down lists instead should not be too hard. Chris, I committed your request. BTW. refering a bug which was closed as fixed over a decade ago might confuse some people. ;-) Feel free to create new bugs against the documentation.
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