Writing custom reports for Customers

[Wm]

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 18:03:17 <548B8245.1030301 at cmail.nu>  Matt Kowske 
<jmk at cmail.nu>

>I am trying to use GnuCash to do accounting for a real estate investment
>LLC. I have found that there is a limitation in that you can't create
>"classes" like you can in Quickbooks

I am unfamiliar with QB, in any event it is best not to presume people 
know about application A when asking questions about application B.

> but some people have found clever
>workarounds for htis on the web. One posted here:
>
>http://gnucash.uservoice.com/forums/101223-feature-request/suggestions/1
>543027-transaction-classifications
>(near the bottom)

An interesting thread that I wasn't aware of, thank you, it gives me 
some use cases to work with in my current area of interest (non-profit 
fund accounting) which may seem orthogonal but isn't.

>... is to setup individual properties as Customers and individual
>expenses as Vendors. This way you can "tag" expenses to certain
>properties. This seems to work pretty well, except the reporting on
>Customers is lacking for this type of use for it. I would need to
>produce a P&L report for each "customer" or property and don't see any
>way to do that currently.
>
>So, finally, to my question -- before I spend hours learning how to
>write a customer GnuCash report, could someone more experienced tell me
>if this would be even possible? A report just like the "Income
>Statement" already in the program but narrowed down to only a particular
>customer?

OK, first the bad news.  Unless you are already familiar with the 
language used to write most of gnc's reports you don't want to start 
there.

Second, depending on the number of entities (in your case properties) 
there is no reason why you can't structure your CoA thus:

PropertyA-Assets
PropertyA-Income
PropertyA-Expenses
PropertyA-Liabilities

PropertyB-Assets
PropertyB-Income
PropertyB-Expenses
PropertyB-Liabilities

you'd then use the existing reports and select PropertyA or PropertyB in 
the Accounts section.  That is unlikely to be attractive if you have 
hundreds of properties and you get in and out of investment situations 
on a frequent (say more often than monthly) basis.

Third, if you choose to use one of the SQL capable storage methods you 
have the full power of SQL reporting which more people understand and 
will be able to help you with.

-- 
Wm...