Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [150]
Next up is the Account Type. In this box you find the five account types introduced earlier as well as other types used for special purposes. The point of our Paycheck account is to keep track of income, so scroll down until you find the Income entry, and select that. After Account Type is the Parent Account box. Accounts can be nested, which means that one account can exist as part of another account. You already have an account called Income, so click on the plus sign next to New Top Level Account. This expands the tree to show your existing accounts. Scroll down until you see the Income account and select it. This puts your Paycheck account under the Income account.
If you don't see the Account Type and Parent Account fields, it is probably because you need to resize the window to be taller. If the window is already as tall as your screen allows, you probably need to adjust your screen resolution, which both KDE and GNOME allow through dialog boxes.
Figure 8-55. The New Account screen
If this account was for stocks and other special commodities, you could set up a way to get price quotes (say, to check the value of a stock) online. But explaining this is beyond the purpose of this chapter. The Notes field just lets you add notes to yourself, which you can see later if you go back to this screen.
Finally, there are two checkboxes near the bottom: Tax Related and Placeholder. The Tax Related checkbox links this account with tax information so that certain tax values are automatically calculated. Using this property is beyond the scope of this chapter.
The Placeholder account is used for accounts that only serve as organizers for other accounts. For example, you may have three sources of income: job, parents, and your weekend web design business. In this case, you would place all three accounts under the Income account. Now the Income account shouldn't have any activity directly inside of it, because all of your income comes from one of these three sources. To enforce this rule, you would check the Placeholder option in the Income account's settings window. This disallows entries in the Income ledger, so you can be sure that income is properly recorded in one of the three subaccounts. You don't want this option for your Paycheck account, so keep the box unchecked.
Click OK on the New Account window, and you are taken back to the main account window page. You can see that the newly created Paycheck account has been highlighted. Also notice that it has been placed under the Income account, just like you wanted.
If you want to edit the properties of an existing account, simply click on that account to select it, and then right-click on the account to bring up the context menu. Select Edit Account under the context menu to bring up the properties screen.
Deleting accounts
If you create an account erroneously, select that account with your mouse and then right-click on it. Select the Delete Account menu item to delete that account from your file. Beware that this affects all records pertaining to this account and may leave your accounts in an unbalanced state.
Do not delete an account just because you have closed it (for example, you paid off a credit card and cut it up or you closed an account at an old bank). Even though the account is closed, you do not want to lose all records of the transactions contained in that account, and deleting it may unbalance your other accounts.
Unfortunately, there is no real way to hide closed accounts so they no longer appear in your accounts