when you're used to quicken's /classes

[cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com]

On 03 Oct 2001 11:22:29 CDT, the world broke into rejoicing as
Bill Gribble <grib@linuxdevel.com>  said:
> On Wed, 2001-10-03 at 10:25, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> > The intent was to handle this with the 'action' field (the second or
> > third field from the left in the register).  The idea was to be able to 
> > able to select one or more 'actions' for a split, as well as define your
> > own (in addition to the small set of predefined defaults).   However, 
> > this functionality is currently crippled; also, there are no reports 
> > that allow you to get summaries based on the value of the action field.
> > (although you can query for a list of transations with s specific set
> > action.)
> > 
> > Fully enabling a correctly functioning 'action' field in gnucash 
> > is probably one of the simpler unfinished work items ... we need someone
> > to step up to the plate on this ..
> 
> It had always been my understanding that we would use slots in the KVP
> structure of the transaction for class-like functionality.  That way,
> you could have multiple 'class' tags associated with a transaction if
> necessary.  
> 
> The underlying infrstructure is all there, we just never added a GUI to
> allow you to explicitly set the 'class' tags or, as Linas points out,
> reports that use them. 

A traditional way of describing this is via the term "cost centre."

It sort of cross-cuts things, and is used when an organization is big enough 
to have logical divisions.

Examples of cost centres would be:

-> Each building, if you're doing property management
-> Each department in a company
-> Each manager that has power over their own budget.

If you've got 5000 people, and want to organize phone bills by group, you 
_don't_ create 50 different accounts for phone bills.  You have just one.  But 
each bill that comes in for a different group will be allocated to the 
department's "cost centre."

And so this give another dimension on which to roll things up...

-> You can do a global P&L statement where you say "What are total phone 
costs?"
-> You can do a P&L statement for each department which pull out the phone 
bills
for each department.

Supposing several departments are in one building, you might have rent and 
heat bills that are shared, and then have to get allocated in some manner.  
Sometimes that happens; sometimes there are higher level organizational groups 
that own aggregated costs.

This is _NOT_ functionality that folks need at home, but it would be quite 
necessary for larger scale corporate use of GnuCash...
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