Best way to manage utilities
Mike or Penny Novack
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sat May 3 17:02:05 EDT 2014
>
>
> I understand that you suggest/prefer spreadsheets to to this.
> But I think is not harm to modify existing (double) accounts, to give
> to the users more flexibility.
>
> Anyway, I'm only a beginner, and your opinion maybe is most important
> for the community and the developers.
> Thanks for your suggestions
> Alberto
I think this is perhaps confusion about what a bookkeeping system
does/should do.
There are many things in our lives of which we might want to keep track.
Money is just one of them, and doing THAT job is what accounting
packages like gnucash are for. Even in normal businesses, there are
other things to track, things that have SOME relationship to the money,
but also much data that has nothing to do with money.
Take an "inventory system". The tie in to the accounting package is the
book value which changes as items are removed from inventory (sold) or
added to inventory as more purchased (account payable with vendor). But
there are a LOT of other things we expect of an "inventory system",
things like number currently on hand, reorder point, where shelved, who
the vendor is, etc. Those things are NOT properly part of an accounting
system.
Record keeping related to your utility use can of course be useful to
you. And so you need to consider the ways you might best go about that.
However the accounting system itself doesn't really relate to anything
"real" like that, just the money part of it. Please, I am NOT saying
that other systems might not have ties to the accounting system, might
not produce "feeds". Thus a "point of sale" system such as might be used
by a retail business might be sending a feed to accounting, a feed to
inventory, a feed to commissions (if sales person compensation depended
on sales), etc. But while the whole might be considered "the business
system" the accounting system would be a discrete part.
Michael D Novack
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