Project Report

Robert L Brush III bobbrush3 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 28 00:53:57 EDT 2011


The short version: Look in the Reports menu for "Business" and then
"Customer Summary". This report totals everything "tagged" by Customer
and displays the total income, expenses, and the difference, including
the %. You can sort the report by name, profit, expense, or income. You
can also select or deselect expense and income accounts, to enable yet
another degree of control. There is also the concept of "Jobs" which
are yet another subcategory under Customers, although I have not used
that feature.

The long version:

You can tag using the account list, although to be reasonable you
wouldn't want to have more that 1-10 categories.  This is made easy
with the auto-fill feature on invoices.  In your case, open a new
invoice for the correct customer and type "Foam-Rubber Pillows" and
attribute this to "Income:FRP", on the next line type "Feathers
Pillows" and use "Income:FP".  From now on when creating new invoices
you can type "F O" or "F E" and it will fill in the rest including the 
correct income accounts.  Likewise you can open a new bill and type in 
"Feathers" and use the account "Expenses:Cost of Goods Sold:FP" and
"Foam Rubber" and use the account "Expenses:Cost of Goods Sold:FRP". To
calculate the profit you can open the "Profit & Loss" report under
"Reports" Income & Expense" and click the paper and wrench icon next to
the printer icon on the button bar, then deselect the "FP" income and
expense accounts or the "FRP" accounts, and compare the results of the
two reports.

The second way to tag the data would be to bill a "Feathers Pillows
Project" customer or a "Foam-Rubber Pillows Project" customer. Using
customers will allow for a lot more projects than using income/expense
accounts but limits your ability to track customers, or at least makes
it complicated.  You also create invoices to record sales of the two
projects. In the Reports menu under "Business" there is a report titled
"Customer Summary". This report totals everything "tagged" by Customer,
in this case "projects" and displays the total income, expenses, and
the difference, including the %. You can sort the report by name,
profit, expense, or income. You can also select or deselect expense and
income accounts.

I think it would be better to track both the profitability of the two
projects and individual customers by using Income/Expense accounts,
customer tags, and the Customer Summary report.

I would probably enter subcontractors who deliver under the employees
type, and bill to the appropriate customer job and project expense
account, but if it was something like UPS or FedEx, I would probably
enter as a Vendor type.

I hope this is helpful,  Bob




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