Report per activity

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Kurt Roeckx wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I just took over as treasurer of a small organisation, and I'm
>looking at how to organise things.  We have a few activities every
>year and it involves things like buying food and drinks, and then
>selling that at the activity, paying royalties for music, and so
>on.
>
>After everything is done the other people would like to see an
>overview of the income and expense related to that activity.  Is
>there a way to make a report for that?
>
>
>Kurt
>  
>
This isn't  problem with just gnucash. In general, double entry 
bookkeeping allows just one hierarchy of accounts (one chart of 
accounts). That means you have to choose which way the accounts are 
grouped and can't easily (from within the books by themselves) generate 
the reports in multiple ways. You have a couple choices how to proceed.

1) Subsidiary books for events --- you would choose this method 
especially if events had their own bank account. This is not unlike when 
there is a separate "petty cash" account. The only extra work involved 
is when transfers are made between the sets of books (main to subsidiary 
to open and at the end, to close).

2) In the main books with "contra*" accounts. You can now easily report 
on the event but expenses aren't grouped so this can be work at tax 
reporting time <<a 501(c) doesn't PAY taxes but it still may be filing 
-- for example, "postage" is a line item on the 990/990-EZ and even 
though none of the organizations for whom I keep books is over the 
threshold for FILING the 990-EZ I still have to fill it out for the MA 
state filing>>

3) You prepare event reports using the DATA from the gnucash books and 
standard reports. Just because gnucash doesn't generate the report that 
you want doesn't mean that you as treasurer can't prepare that report. 
In this case you would use a standard chart of accounts with income and 
expense accounts having separate sub accounts in each category for each 
event. You then use all the income and expense data that pertains to an 
event to prepare a report for that event.

Understand what I am saying? The "view" of the group activities as your 
board of directors wants to see them and the "view" as need for some 
report to the government might be very different. Your job is to be able 
to present both and your accounting system must be able to provide the 
DATA to be able to do both but not necessarily to produce the reports 
without you having to do any work.

  
Michael D Novack

* A contra account is one where its balance can be expected to be on the 
opposite side of the ledger than usual for an account of that type. For 
example, if you expected an event to make money you have an event 
account under "income" and under that two main children, event income 
and event expenses (yes, as an INCOME account -- but whose entries will 
be on other side of the ledger, equivalent to negative).