Chart of Accounts Groupings

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Mon Jul 18 13:02:46 EDT 2011


>
>I am treasurer of a small non-profit and must file the tax form 990-EZ.
>  
>
I am too.

>Currently, I print out the chart of accounts and manually sum up the various
>amounts for each tax line item. For example, we may have several events,
>each with printing costs, and I sum the different chart of account printing
>cost numbers to obtain the Printing cost tax form line item.
>
>Can Gnucash be configured to do this for me?  Please note that I do not
>require that the items be transferable to the tax form. I would just like a
>report with the combined categories that I could manually enter into the tax
>form.
>
>  
>
Depends on what information is most important to your organization. It 
is fundamental to traditional double entry bookkeeping that their is ONE 
hierarchical structure to the chart of accounts and so only one way 
accounts can be associated together. Some of the various software 
products may provide OTHER facilities for precisely the purpose you 
describe but that's not technically part of the "books". Just like you 
describe manually adding up different items that must be reported 
combined on the 990 what these "other features" are doing with labels or 
whatever is providing a mechanism to automate that summing up.

But you COULD structure your chart to make 990 reporting easier instead. 
The tradeoff is in then losing easy access to other information. Thus 
for our organization we'd like to know what the printing and postage 
costs were for the annual meeting (grouped with all the other annual 
meeting costs) since "how much does annual meeting cost" is important 
information to the board.

You could also get gnucash to produce a report "just printing expenses" 
(or whatever) but manually selecting what accounts to include at least 
as much work as manually adding them. If you had a great number of such 
accounts and they were fixed from year to year you could save a report 
selecting just those accounts (each time bring up the saved report for 
just "printing accounts", then option edit the dates.

Michael


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