Classifications or TAGS

[Phil Longstaff]

In Quicken, classes allow another way of aggregating or marking a split in a way 
which is orthogonal to the account.

Using cars as an example, I might have classes "2010BMW" and "2008Civic".  A 
transaction involving gas would be:

Bank           $50.00CR
   Expenses:Auto:Gas/2010BMW     $50.00DB

or

Liabilities:VISA    $60.00CR
   Expenses:Auto:Maintenance/2008Civic       $60.00DB

A summary report could be generated for a time period:

                                        2010BMW            2008Civic
Expenses:Auto:Gas               $50.00                   $0.00
Expenses:Auto:Maintenance    $0.00                  $60.00

I currently use sub-accounts for each account (Expenses:Auto:Gas:2010BMW and 
Expenses:Auto:Gas:2008Civic, and same for maintenance), but there is no way to 
provide the tabular report Quicken could.

Another example of classes would be if I own rental properties, in which case 
both rental income and expenses can have class assigned to splits.

Different accounting programs handle this idea in different ways.  With Quicken, 
any split could have "accountName/className" instead of just "accountName".  
With a larger accounting system I've used, each account had a number and the 
number was split into segments.  Each segment had numeric codes.  Given N 
segments, the account number space was then an N-dimensional cube, so for a 
college, for example, they could have segments for 
expenseType/department/building if they wanted and could track supplies for the 
English Department in the ABC building.  In this case, the account number might 
be 410-10-25 where 410=supplies, 10=English Dept and 25=ABC building.  In most 
cases, 00 was "general" or "not tracked" so they might have 410-10-00 if they 
don't care about the building.  However, if they try to allocate heating costs 
to the departments, they might have 420-10-25.  Quicken's use of classes is 
essentially the same as this, where N=2.  For personal or small business use, I 
can't see more than N=2 being required.

 Phil
---------
I used to be a hypochondriac AND a kleptomaniac. So I took something for it.




________________________________
From: Ian X Waddington <iwaddox at gmail.com>
To: clanlaw at googlemail.com
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Sent: Tue, December 21, 2010 11:08:28 AM
Subject: RE: Classifications or TAGS

Colin

Sorry but I have never used Quicken.  Can you point me towards some reference 
material or better still a link to the Quicken manual that describes what you 
are looking for.

Current references and acknowledgements are

http://community.kde.org/KMyMoney/Features/Tags  -In short, tagging is meant to 
group different categories together in case when some of the transactions in the 
category doesn't logically belong together.  Even if memos can be used to 
accomplish this same goal, they aren't designed for this kind of functionality 
and since they aren't very convenient to use. 


MS-Money help file - You can use classifications and subclassifications to 
organise your finances in more detail. In Money, you can designate two types of 
classifications. For example, if you set up a classification for your 
properties, within that classification you can assign transactions to Property 
1, Property 2, and so on. You can then set up a second classification for your 
family members in order to assign transactions to yourself, your spouse, and 
your child.

Ian


-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Law [mailto:clanlaw at googlemail.com] 
Sent: 21 December 2010 15:59
To: Ian X Waddington
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Classifications or TAGS

On 21 December 2010 15:40, Ian X Waddington <iwaddox at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just in case anyone has embarked on the same idea I just wanted to let 
> interested parties know I have started drafting out requirements for 
> adding Classifications or TAGS to GnuCash.

Will that be similar to Classes in Quicken?

Colin

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