Best way to manage utilities

Ian Konen iankonen at gmail.com
Thu May 1 13:05:37 EDT 2014


Two advantages of having investment accounts recorded as shares that I
don't think you would gain for utilities are 1: you can use
Finance:Quotes to have GnuCash update stock prices without manually
entering their changing values all the time., and 2.  (In the U.S. at
least) you often need to report the actual numbers of shares purchased
or sold on tax forms when reporting capital gains/losses, so having a
record of your # of shares as well as their monetary value is an
important piece of your financial record.  There is nothing like that
for utilities.  If you run a business, for example and are deducting
Utilities as a business expense, you only need to report the amount of
money paid towards the bill, not the kWh of electricity used or therms
of gas used.  (Not a tax expert, but I think this is true for any
business entity).

Another point is that pricing of utilities is often more complicated
than price per unit.  Again, I only have a local perspective, so maybe
things are simpler in Italy, but my electric bill here has tiered
pricing: after a certain number of kWh used each month, the price per
kWh changes.  There might be utilities that change rate as a function
of the time of day (maybe I'm only thinking of phone bills, but it
stands to reason utilities might implement peak pricing).

Long story short, I don't know if the conversion from amount used to
price is beyond the capability of entering into a GnuCash formula, but
I do think it's more complicated than share prices and currency
exchange rates.  I'd add another vote to the "use a spreadsheet"
column if you really want to understand the relationship between your
usage and your bill, or if you're just trying to track your total
usage, and use the price only as an decent approximation of your usage
in GnuCash if you're trying to plan your budget or looking for ways to
cut expenses.

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 4:57 AM, Alberto Dante <alberto.dante at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to register quantity and price unit (electricity, for istance), all
> utilities are charged monthly or two-monthly in Italy.
> Currently there are two investment account types that manage quantity and
> price unit: Stock and Mutual Fund, having the same functionality, and
> allowed as sub-accounts only of Assets and Lialilities.
> We should have only one investment account "Commodity" (as sub-account of
> Assets and Liabilities) to manage Stock, Mutual Funds, ... and a similar
> account "Utilities" (as sub-account of Income and Expenses) to manage
> electricity, ...
> I don't know if changes of Price Scatterplot report are needed.
> Please refer to Bug 728829 too.
> Thanks Alberto
>
>> Depends what you want to do. I wouldn't expect Gnucash to, for example,
>> translate our household energy usage into tonnes of CO2, and graph it
>> with annotations marking when there were changes in our main
>> energy-consuming appliances and improvements to our insulation. I also
>> have it compare the standard flat-rate charge for our electricity that
>> we currently pay with the price we would pay if we chose a time-of-use
>> plan.
>>
>> All our utilities except phone/ISP are charged quarterly so the effort
>> maintaining the second set of figures is minimal.
>>
>> The utilities spreadsheets have remained unchanged through three changes
>> of accounting program - spreadsheet cash book, Quicken for Mac, and now
>> Gnucash.
>>
>> Peter
>
>
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