Set of accounts for small rental business.

[John Morris]

  I think this type of business is a perfect example of why a tagging system orthogonal to the account system would be extremely useful. Using such a system, the actual expense (new locks, electricity, cleaning, whatever) would be applied to the correct base account regardless of the rental unit involved. In addition, a tag would be applied to the transaction indicating the rental unit in question. This would allow the owner to easily track total expenses by category (maintenance, utilities, etc.) as well as by rental unit and any combination of the two.

  Because GnuCash does not include an orthogonal tagging system, I have had to develop my own. Although I don't use it for rentals, I do find it very useful. I'm still very much in the development stage, but here is what I have so far.

1. When I want to tag a transaction, I add the tags to the beginning of the memo or note field (depending on whether I'm tagging the whole transaction or just one split). The tags are simply a comma-separated list of words enclosed in delimiters that I'm unlikely to need in other uses of the memo and note fields. I chose the slash character so they look like /Travel/ and /Editide/, but other characters would also work.

  A nice feature of GnuCash is that it autofills the note and memo fields from other transactions in the same register. Because my tags all start with the slash character and appear at the very beginning of the field, GnuCash helps me remember how the tag is supposed to be spelled. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to "accept" the tag and then keep typing some other notes in the field; I simply have to keep typing the tag, finish it up with the final slash character and then type the note: "/Travel/Dinner with Aunt Elba". Another small annoyance is that the autofilling does not pull from other registers. However, that annoyance can be avoided by working in the General Ledger where it seems to pull from all transactions, presumably because they all appear in a single register there.

2. Once the data is stored in a consistent manner, I want to summarize it to gain insights. The first step is to find all the transactions with a particular tag. This can be done by searching from the Accounts window for all instances of the tag in the memo or note field. Fortunately, GnuCash offers regular-expression searches. So for my system, I would search on "^/Travel/" to find my travel tags or "^/Editide/" to find my business tags. The leading caret character makes grep look only at the beginning of the line and the rest of the search is a simple literal. Of course, much more complex searches could be devised. Because I have not started using more than one tag per transaction, I don't have to worry about that. If I were, I could search on "^/[^/]*Travel[^/]*/" or something similar. One annoyance is that I have to search in both the notes and memo fields. I have to be careful to tell GnuCash that I want a hit if either criterion matches. Otherwise, I would get very few hits with the default setting.

3. This find operation gives me a register populated only with transactions involving the desired tag(s). The next step is to pull a report on those transactions. I have done almost nothing with this, other than to confirm that it can be done. I imagine that the standard reports will not be as flexible as I like, so I will need to dig into Scheme to write my own reports. Unfortunately, I don't have time for that right now, so that part of the project is waiting for me to get back to it.

Best,
John

On Nov 18, 2014, at 1:43 PM, Richard Dawson wrote:

> I am trying to imagine the best set of accounts to manage dozen or two 
> individual rental units.  It would seem desirable to track income and expenses 
> for each unit, income from each tenant, and also be able to sum up all 
> expenses and income to determine the overall profit or loss.
> 
> One could have the expense, income, and liabilities accounts with individual 
> accounts within each one for tenants and units, or one might have an account 
> for each unit with expense, income, etch within each account.  
> 
> As you can see, my concepts are a little cloudy.  Any suggestions?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Richard