Dividing accounts in multiple branches

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Dieter wrote:

>Thanks for the fast reply,
>
>I realize that this isn't the common method of double bookkeeping.
>
This is NOT just a matter of your particular reporting requirements. 
Normal double entry bookkeeping groups income accounts together and 
expense accounts together which can make it difficult (from just the raw 
reports) to see the profitability or lack thereof of particular events 
(say an organization runs a number of fundraising events as some of the 
non-profits for which I am treasurer or on the finance committee does).

BUT (a very big but) you are not limited to raw reports. You can 
consider those a DATA from which you (or your accountant) then prepares 
the final reports that get presented to the board or filed with some 
governmental agency.

Back when I began as treasurer with one of those organizations and 
gnucash I asked the accountant person who assisted me "should I write 
some custom reports?" (I am a retired senior analyst, a few hundred 
thousand lines of financial software in my day) and he said, "Mike, 
don't bother. Just give me the raw reports and I'll deal with it. Like 
any other accountant I have my favorite editing application I use for 
producing the "good copy" reports.". If  you look at the typical annual 
report of an organization you'll see more stuff than just what might 
come directly from the bookkeeping program. Things like fixed text 
describing the accounting principles used (here non-profits are allowed 
some choices in reporting but should specify which options they are 
using) plus all the annotations explaining unusual amounts (like: this 
year's annual meeting appears high because includes an invoice from the 
previous year's meeting that did not get settled till this year -- or 
vice versa). So if you wanted the final report to come out of the 
bookkeeping package it would need a full power editor and why reinvent 
the wheel?

Understand what I am saying? Can you see how if the accounts were 
(initially) grouped the way normal for double entry bookkeeping and you 
had the standard reports produced by the package you could take the 
(exported) reports and regroup as your heart desires using your favorite 
editing software. Many of us face this problem as in any case double 
entry bookkeeping allows just ONE tree structure (chart of accounts) and 
sometimes we want to present the data organized in multiple ways.

HOWEVER -- I did describe how you could group as you wanted in gnucash. 
Just ignore the difference between "income" and "expense" using just ONE 
of these. To do that think in terms of "debit" and "credit" (left and 
right sides of a ledger account) ignoring the column labels gnucash is 
using to make things easier for newbies who never learned bookkeeping 
back in the pre computer pen and ink on paper days using blank (lined 
but unlabeled) ledger paper. IMHO that would be harder for you to do 
correctly than modern standard and regroup from the raw data but it's up 
to you.

Michael