tracking per-project profit/loss

[Chris Peachment]

On Mon, 2013-02-25 at 12:57 +0000, Dan Hulme wrote:
> Thanks for your speedy reply, Chris.
> On 24/02/13 20:22, Chris Peachment wrote:
> > You can add a new top level account to the chart (like Assets,
> > Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expenses) for each project. It works
> > to identify it as an Income account. Then add subsidiary Income
> > and Expense accounts under it. The standard profit and loss report
> > will gather all the income accounts under the Income header,
> > across the main accounts AND the projects. It will gather the
> > Expense accounts in the same manner.
> >
> > You can create a separate report for just the project details.
> >
> > I am doing this for projects in a not-for-profit operation.
> >
> I thought about doing it this way, but we have maybe two dozen
> 'projects' a year, and it seems like a lot of extra things to set up
> per-project. I'm afraid of my accounts becoming unmanageable with this
> system. What's your experience doing it this way? Do you have a lot of
> projects, and do you find recreating the accounts for different types of
> expenses takes much time?
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Just limited experience and with only 3 projects per year the
extra chart structure is not significant.

It's only an opinion, but I suspect that even two dozen projects
would not be an onerous burden if they were repeated from year to
year. If not repeated then you would need to close the accounts
each year and delete the obsolete project structures to avoid the
clutter.

Per project just needs header and two accounts if transaction
descriptions are adequate. If you have many transactions that
you want to segregate by topic under the project, then it is
more of a burden to create the multiple income or expense
accounts.