Setting up GNUcash for an association

[effe iets anders]

Yo,
THanks again for replying, it gives me more insight to GNUcash. However,
although it might be due to the fact that I am not a native speaker, you
seem to react a little hostile. Please, don't do that, I don't want my
question to become a fight or something, you both are trying to help :)

2008/10/29 Bob Smits <bob at rsmits.ca>

> On October 27, 2008 07:07:09 pm Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> > >You can do all this in Gnucash. Just add under donations accounts like
> > >income/donations/unrestricted/name, for example.
> >
> > Bob, I think you are missing the point I was trying to make. Your
> > example is perfect.
> >
> > What I was saying is that you can't (in one set of double entry books,
> > the application irrelevant) group the same accounts in multiple ways.
> > Suppose you did what you suggest here. You can get the total
> > "donations", the total "unrestricted donations" (and presumably the
> > total "restricted donations", etc.) but you can't now get the total for
> > a donor (a particular name).
>
> Why not? Unless (boy you guys have weird categories) your donors are in
> multiple categories themselves the total for John Smith, an "unrestricted"
> donor can be found just by looking at his account under
> income/donations/John
> Smith.


As I tried to point our before, making seperate accounts manually won't do
for me. I expect (well, hope actually) that the number of accounts would be
ridiculously high, so that won't work.


>
>
> I think part of the problem here is that you are assuming that everyone who
> does this needs all these multiple categories when in reality, we don't.
> All
> I need to do is keep track of the total donations from each person, and in
> my
> case they're all simply contributors.
>
> > The IRS doesn't care whether the donations
> > made by person X were restricted or not, just whether or not came to
> > over $250 total for the year. Similarly when figuring for the periodic
> > 501c3 status reporting where you want the donors grouped as either
> > "non-qualified" (insiders and fat cats) or "general public". For
> > different purposes you want the accounts to have different parents, a
> > different "chart of accounts".
>
> But that wasn't what the original poster asked - you're the one introducing
> all these irrelevant (to 90 % of the world) considerations. WE don't give a
> hoot about the IRS and what they want in a foreign country.


Well, being able to calculate the total for each donor was actually one of
the things we would like to be able to do. But also seeing how many
recurring donations there are etc. A little of donor intelligence :)


>
>
> > An account can have only one parent -- and again that's not specifically
> > GnuCash but a "chart of accounts" matter.
> >
> > I was in no way shape or form suggesting that GnuCash couldn't/shouldn't
> > be used for each of the multiple sets of books/sub books. Although in
> > this instance, since double entry accounting isn't needed for "donor
> > accounting" perhaps overkill.
>
> Gnucash works just fine for me in my applications. I used it to keep track
> of
> about $70,000 in donations over 5 weeks recently from 800 donors. It is
> not,
> of course, the only documentation I use in being ready for my audit. But it
> does work just fine for my accounts.

Hm, that is interesting. And did you create seperate accounts for each donor
here?

Thanks, Lodewijk


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