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Comment by racked | Hacker News Reader

I quickly researched this a couple of months ago and came to the conclusion that using separate accounts was the only easy-to-understand way to do it. So now I have accounts like:

    Hosting Expenses
    [SomeTag] Hosting Expenses

It's nice because its compatible with all the built-in reports, including graphs, though it takes a little while to configure presets for them all filtered by the right accounts.

Also curious to hear if anyone knows a better way.

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> using separate accounts was the only easy-to-understand way to do it

This can't possibly be right... If I'm going on holidays, I don't want to have to open a new "holidays" account; holiday expenses are still expenses. If I accepted this, and I wanted to separate holidays in 2021 from holidays in 2022 by using different accounts, you can imagine how many one-off accounts id have laying around. No, this is confusing the concepts of an account as an accounting concept, with the concept of a generic aggregation segment.

I agree. It's the only easy-to-understand way to do it _in GnuCash_, _that I could find_, anyway

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