Best way to manage utilities

[Alberto Dante]

Hi Ian, yes, I agree, you are right...
> 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).
In Italy pricing of utilities is very complicated too...
> 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).
I have already lots of spradsheets, but I'd like simply to manage with 
Gnucash the overall (two-monthly) bill amount, the quantity of energy 
(kWh) and the average price unit (Euro/kWh) = bill amount / quantity of 
energy, nothing else.
> 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.