When automatically created control accounts, such as Fixed assets, are renamed, they appear in light grey instead of black in dropdown lists for selection of control accounts. For example, if the accounts related to fixed assets are renamed as Furniture and Furniture, accumulated depreciation, the following shows when defining a fixed asset:
But when new control accounts are created, the following shows:
This difference is owing to the automatic control account being defined on the balance-sheet-control-account-form and custom control accounts on the control-account-for-fixed-assets-form.
Similar situations exist for all other categories of control accounts.
This is by design. Actually if someone renames Fixed assets, at cost account to something more specific like Furniture, at cost. It’s not how I meant this to be used. For this reason, I think the best approach will be to disallow renaming system accounts if custom account can be selected. So if someone needs to rename the account, they will need to create custom account.
WHY ???.
Discriminating between system accounts which have or don’t have custom control accounts just creates artificial barriers and unnecessary confusion. For simplicity, all system accounts should be available equally.
For example, why should a simple name change force a User into doing an unnecessary edit for all the sub-items belonging to that system account.
It just leads to more complexity if one desired outcome has multiple ways of doing it. Also, the software needs to make it easy to do the right thing and more difficult to do the wrong thing. The example @Tut has provided should be more difficult to end up with than just creating all custom control accounts.
As for updating all sub-accounts manually, sure - that would be a major inconvinience but there is going to be a function to move sub-accounts between control accounts in bulk. Then it will be a matter of a few clicks rather than updating sub-accounts one-by-one.
If the desired outcome is just to re-title the system control account, say “Cash at Bank” to “Bank Accounts”, then how is that more complex than being required to create a whole new custom control account just to achieve that title “Bank Accounts” ?
Once again, why is it the wrong thing to re-title a system control account ?
For example, all my system control accounts have been re-titled. If this practice is going to be “banned” then when that limitation is introduced you are going to have to run a background process which does a system to control account conversion. The question is this, is all that effort worth just over an account title especially as increasingly system control accounts have been phased out, such as with Fixed Assets and Taxation.
That would have been nice to have had when custom control accounts were first added as a feature.
