Class accounting?

[ypktm]

Jeff - 

Just wondering if you found any workarounds to the "class less" problem of
GnuCash. 

I manage my own rental property in my part-time and Initially after reading
rave reviews of GnuCash, I tried to use GnuCash for managing my rental
property business. However, similiar to your situation, I was not able to
find a category/class feature available in QuickBooks for Gnucash. Since I
have multiple rental property, I wanted to find income, expenses, tax
reports for all of these properties (separately) and combined (as a whole).
I could not find a straight forward way of doing this in Gnucash.

Hence after doing bit more research, I decided to use QuickBooks. I even
wrote a small user guide of using the "Class Feature" of managing multiple
rental property in QuickBooks:

www.geocities.com/ypant/QuickBooks2005ForRentalProperties.pdf

After using QuickBooks for a few years (part-time), I realized that
QuickBooks required a bit more formalism (longer time) than I really wanted
and I had to use two different packages (MS Money 2004 and QuickBooks) for
my personal data as well as business data. After further investigation, I
found that MS Money 2004 had a feature called "Category" and I have been
effectively using it for categorizing my income/expenses for different
rental properties.

Due to many security issues of MS Windows platform, I am now moving towards
using one of the Linux/UNIX OS and was wondering whether the GnuCash is
planning to use the class feature similiar to "QuickBooks".

Let me know. I am really surprised that so many users in the forum below
have difficulty of understanding the category/cost center/class feature. 

Regards,
Yagna




Jeff Wiegley wrote:
> 
> I have bank accounts and I buy lots of stuff for various
> personal projects.
> 
> What I've been wanting to do for a while is to account
> for what get's spent on each individual project better.
> 
> In quicken I might do this with categories but that doesn't
> seem to be a very sophisticated method of doing it. And
> besides, Gnucash doesn't have categories.
> 
> I can make accounts for the various vendors that I buy from
> and for my credit/checking accounts that I pay for this with
> and I know how to basic double-entry so that a purchase made
> appears in the bank/credit account and also in the vendor
> account.
> 
> The problem is I want it tied to a project "account" as well.
> I guess I could insert a second, equal transaction. one
> between the bank account and the project and a second between
> the project and the vendor. But this seems really cumbersome
> and now your gnucash bank account doesn't look anything
> remotely like your bank statement.
> 
> How does one handle this?
> If I think about like food...
> 
> I want to track project "food". I make vendor accounts for
> all my grocery stores and I organize them under a tree
> account called food. great now may bank statement looks
> like my gnucash accounts. If the bank statement says I made
> a purchase at Ralph's (a California grocery store) then
> the gnucash account shows a credit in the checking account
> and a debit in the Ralph's account. and I can say how much
> did I spend on food, since Ralph's is categorized under food?
> 
> The problem is that this doesn't extend to projects.
> 
> Let's say I have two projects, "Doomsday weapon" and
> "gardening robot". Both projects are independent from
> one another, both are funded by the same set of asset accounts
> and both require electrical and mechanical components to
> complete.
> 
> I buy lot of stuff from a company called McMaster-Carr
> (they sell just about every basic industrial electrical or
> mechanical component under the sun in 1400 page catalog.)
> 
> But I can't put the McMaster account under "doomsday weapon"
> because then all purchases for the gardening project also
> get accounted for under the doomsday project. I can't put
> McMaster under the gardening project for the symmetric
> argument.
> 
> So it doesn't fit the food model. (Even the Food model
> doesn't work because I might want to account for food I
> bought for myself versus food I bought for guests as gifts
> under projects and such. I.E. not everything I buy at
> Ralph's is consumed ultimately paid for by me but rather my
> roommate.)
> 
> How does one account for project expenditures under GnuCash?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> -- 
> Jeff Wiegley, PhD
> Cyte.Com, LLC
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