Can one change all instances of a line item referring to Account A to refer to Account B?
(In GnuCash, the way I’d do this is to delete Account B, at which point if it still had transactions it would ask me to assign a new account for the references to the deleted account).
Several things can be done:
It all depends what you are really trying to accomplish, other than match features of another software program.
Are you referring to Customer and/or Supplier accounts where there can be the customer/Supplier account in the header and the line item(s)? In these cases it is important to change both instances. I believe that it can be done and at the moment is the best way to merge duplicates.
The scenario here is to substantively change the chart of accounts; not just rename it. For example, let’s say one decides that you have too many sub-accounts in some group, and instead want to remove those accounts and only maintain the supercategory.
Find and recode sounds closest to what I want. My description of GnuCash was meant to be exemplary; fundamentally “Update the account structure and update references to the removed account without having to delete and recreate every transaction” isn’t that unusual a feature.
Lubos has said he intends to extend the functionality of find & recode.
For now batch update would be an efficient way of achieving this. The easiest method is to manually change one transaction then use batch update to replicate it for all other transactions.
Two points on this aspect of your explanation:
Accounts can always be reassigned to other groups. There are no restrictions on that. But understand that groups are nothing more than headings. That means you cannot post any transaction to the group itself, but only to accounts within it. So, for example, if you had a group named Fixed Assets with accounts named Land, Buildings, and Equipment, you could not delete those three accounts or reassign assets to Fixed Assets. You would have to first create a control account named Fixed assets, reassign all your assets to it, then delete the original three accounts, then delete the group named Fixed Assets. (Of course, if you haven’t deleted it, there would already be a default control account called Fixed assets.)
Not based on what you said. Find & recode would be a great way of reposting transactions out of accounts you want to get rid of and into accounts you want to keep using so those accounts can be deleted. But Find & recode will do absolutely nothing to restructure your chart of accounts.
Basically, your process would have to be to create all new accounts first, then Find & Recode, then delete unnecessary accounts.
All in all, this is why it makes sense to design the chart of accounts carefully before you jump into recordkeeping.
Either you misread, or more likely I wasn’t clear. In my example you aren’t just reassigning them to other groups, you’re reassigning and consolidating, which requires reallocating the transactions within. The entire thrust of my question is “What are the ways I can reallocate transactions in bulk, and ideally with a high degree of accuracy?” (Almost by definition, an operation that has the semantics “Change any reference to the Land account to the Fixed Assets account” is more accurate and less error prone than “Go into the Land account and individually reassign each transaction in it individually to Fixed Assets”.)
No argument there! But anyone who has lived through an acquisition or a consolidation will agree that changes to the chart of accounts are sometimes unavoidable.
From my understanding he is asking to extend Find and Recode to every type for transaction. Even if this can be done with batch update, I vote for this since it would be easier, quicker and less error prone.
I completely understood that, which is why I included comments about reallocating transactions first. But there is no way to consolidate one group within another.
That is where renaming can come in under the right circumstances.
There are two problems with that: