balance courses in a training center

[Zhang Weiwu]

Hello. I am advocating Gnu Cash for a training center.

The training center offer a few courses. Thanks to highly dynamic
business environment they had to evaluate a course and decide if they
improve or cancel the course. The evaluation is done in a simple way of:

payment received from students of the course - payment made to teachers
- room cost

If result is negative, either improvement or cancellation.

I have a rough feeling that if I help them set up accounting hierarchy
differently than traditionally is, I could make this calculation easier.
I would do it this way:

    Income
     - Main Sales (training)
       - Course A
       - Course B
       - Course C


    Expense
     - Training
       - Course A
       - Course B
       - Course C


Instead of the traditional way:


    Income
     - Main Sales (student payment)

    Expense
     - Room
     - Payroll


The balance of the courses can be calculated by copying account balances
of a particular course from both income and expense accounts, and
manually make a spreadsheet like this:

Course Name	Income	Expense	Balance
Course_A	3k	5k	-2k
Course_B	5k	3k	2k
Course_C	6k	3k	3k

My questions are:

   1. How do you think if my method?
   2. Is there a way to automate the process, making use of an existing
      gnu cash feature to generate this "balance by courses" sheet?
   3. If I want to add automatic "balance by courses" report generation
      to gnu cash, how difficult do you think it would be?

Thank you very much in advance!

Best.
Zhang Weiwu