Categorization of transactions

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:31:12 -0700 schrieb Dennis Muhlestein:


>>>> I am looking for a way to categorise transactions in GNUCash and cannot 
>>>> find anything on the topic in the documentation.

>>> I think you are looking for the equivalent of what Quicken calls
>>> "classes". Arbitrary tags attached to txns that are completely
>>> independent of the chart of accounts. No such feature exists in
>>> gnucash, though it has been talked about several times. 


> On the other hand, I can see how this feature could be very helpful for 
> some people.  For instance, I have more than one vehicle.  Every time I 
> buy gas, I like to associate the transaction with which car it was 
> purchased for.  I could just make sub accounts under fuel for more than 
> one car, but that is annoying when you want to look at fuel for all 
> vehicles (you have to open sub-accounts, select multiple accounts for 
> reports, ect).  Next, what about insurance, repair, etc.  Do each of 
> these accounts now need multiple sub accounts too?  What if I want to 
> look at all the data (multiple accounts) for just one car?  Now I'd need 
> to open lots of different accounts, or do a more complicated search.
> 
> So in summary, I don't see any reason this isn't a good feature to have. 

The feature (to be able to associate a transaction to different
contexts) is useful, but the implementation in Quicken (with
classes/categories) can give you some headaches. 

E.g. I not only want to separate fuel cost by cars, I also like to
know the costs of an holiday (including the costs for fuel), and I
also like to which of the costs are fix (insurance). 

Classes in Quicken gives you only one extra layer. If you want more
you can use check boxes (for fix costs), accounts, (sub)categories,
special texts in the differents fields, special reports with more or
less complicated searches and options. In the long years I used
quicken I never found a sane system.

I have search in the last weeks for a way to store such additional
informations in gnucash (because I need too). 

Reports and searches doesn't work well. In the report options is
difficult to choose a subset of accounts (at least on windows I
often unset the choice and have to start again) and it is difficult
to save and reuse a customary report. Saving a customary search
seems impossible. This means that while you can use various fields
(including the action field which has a drop down menu) to label a
transaction, it is difficult to use the information later.
   
At the end I decided to use special "reports accounts". E.g. In the
example of the fuel I would enter such an (here simplyfied)
transaction:

credit card                          100
expences:fuel                  100

reports:car1:fuel	       100						
reports:holiday:09             100 
reports                              200  (to balance)

That works fine as long as one doesn't use to much reports (at least
for transactions that have to be entered manually). It is flexible
and I have an uniform method to enter such additional informations.
The main problem is to decide the type of the reports accounts. I'm
using currently mostly "expenses" accounts.

(In theory one could do something similar in Quicken (and I have
done it in special cases), in practice it doesn't work because you
can't add e.g. in the credit card account a transaction concerning
two completly other account, you have to switch to one the other
account first, and this gets very tiresome and is errorprone).


-- 
Ulrike Fischer