Can anyone tell me why FX sometimes, but not always, appends the parent account name to a subaccount name after retrieval from Quickbooks?

There is 40 characters avaialble for the description. FX attempts to get as much of the Sub Account + Parent Account into the description

Wow. Not good design, imho. If it's going to concatenate the 2 names, it needs to be able to do it. Not do it sometimes and not others. The way it is, a report that includes account names looks like junk. To get a clean report, a user can't use sub-accounts. That means a reporting tool is dictating an accounting structure, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Unless, that is, there is some way to strip the parent account name that I've not been able to find. And believe me, I've tried every which way I can think of to strip it out. The only thing I haven't tried is hard-coding, but that makes the smartsheet capability pretty much useless.

Hello:

Software design requires balancing features and constraints. In the case of FX, one of the constraints is that the financial reporter at its heart is the same module used in the full Adagio Ledger and FX versions for QuickBooks, Simply Accounting and Microsoft Office accounting. The developers have to make certain that any new features (i.e. longer Description) are implemented in such a way that everything else continues to work. For instance, a change in the length of the GL description affects input screens and reports throughout most of Adagio's suite of 19 modules.

Having said that, Softrak has a history of solving problems for users once they have been identified.

In the meantime, I've looked at your earlier posting with your samples shown below (where 5500 is the parent Account).

5500 Office Administration
5510 Office Supplies
5520 Office Equipment
5530 Office Administration:Postage
5540 Telephones
5550 Office Administration:Copier

Could you shorten the sub-account descriptions? (i.e. "Office Supplies" becomes "Supplies") This works with accounts like "Postage". Or could you shorten the parent description to "Office Admin"?

I'm well aware of the complexities of software design, having spent 12 years as a programmer and Oracle DBA in a former life. And I'm well aware of the difficulties in trying to integrate apps like QB and FX. However, if a package is going to bill itself as working with various other apps, it should do so, not present the user with a confusing data set. A simple switch to retrieve full account names or sub-account names only would have been worked. But that's just me.

And yes, I could shorten my account names. I just don't like a reporting app dictating terms to my accounting system like that.

I know it may sound like it, but I'm really not dogging FX.

That sounds like a reasonable solution for the next FX version. Now you just have to get Michael to agree!