Job costing / job tracking

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 12/26/2016 11:45 AM, doncram wrote:

>
> For Gnucash to support job costing, it must allow a job code to be attached
> to any entry, and it must provide a standard profit & loss report divided
> by job.
>
> cheers
> Don Cram

I think you perhaps mean "for gnucash to support this WITHOUT requiring 
selection of accounts to be included in the P&L individually". And 
without having the CoA set up to make that easy.

I keep books for non-profits. I don't have any particular problem 
producing "event" reports, etc  But luckily not all that many "events" 
per organization.

And yes I do know what "job costing" is. And how it could make things 
easier by not requiring income/expense items be put into the correct 
account. The issue here is really that (standard) double entry 
bookkeeping only allows one hierarchy (CoA) but we often want the 
information grouped differently for different purposes. For example, we 
might want to know the total spend on postage (printing and postage is a 
line item on the 990/990-EZ) and also to see the postage for each 
fundraising event as an expense of that event.

THAT is your real issue, yes? Because IF you have all the income 
accounts of a job under an income parent for that job and all the 
expense accounts of a job under an expense parent for that job, then a 
P&L including just the accounts of those parents gives the P&L for that 
job.

Michael D Novack