When creating a parent account and subaccounts in the hierarchy, the parent account does not show the total value of the subaccounts. It works as if it is hidden and thus does not show the reality. From my perspective, subaccounts could or should be used as "subprojects" in order to quantify some projects as for instance "World tour project" In such project, it includes transportation, food, etc. With this functionality, it is possible to have a better analyse of the budgets (more powerfull as the tags). If this is not a bug, I suggest that the explanation of how parent and subaccounts are working is written in the help file.
The current source version has been changed to reflect that. The accounts and categories view therefor received a new column called 'posted value' which shows the amount posted to the account/category directly. The 'total value' column shows the sum of its own post-value and that of all sub-accounts and does not change when expanded/collapsed. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 373550 ***