Best way to manage utilities

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Sat May 3 17:02:05 EDT 2014


>
>
> I understand that you suggest/prefer spreadsheets to to this.
> But I think is not harm to modify existing (double) accounts, to give 
> to the users more flexibility.
>
> Anyway, I'm only a beginner, and your opinion maybe is most important 
> for the community and the developers.
> Thanks for your suggestions
> Alberto

I think this is perhaps confusion about what a bookkeeping system 
does/should do.

There are many things in our lives of which we might want to keep track. 
Money is just one of them, and doing THAT job is what accounting 
packages like gnucash are for. Even in normal businesses, there are 
other things to track, things that have SOME relationship to the money, 
but also much data that has nothing to do with money.

Take an "inventory system". The tie in to the accounting package is the 
book value which changes as items are removed from inventory (sold) or 
added to inventory as more purchased (account payable with vendor). But 
there are a LOT of other things we expect of an "inventory system", 
things like number currently on hand, reorder point, where shelved, who 
the vendor is, etc. Those things are NOT properly part of an accounting 
system.

Record keeping related to your utility use can of course be useful to 
you. And so you need to consider the ways you might best go about that. 
However the accounting system itself doesn't really relate to anything 
"real" like that, just the money part of it. Please, I am NOT saying 
that other systems might  not have ties to the accounting system, might 
not produce "feeds". Thus a "point of sale" system such as might be used 
by a retail business might be sending a feed to accounting, a feed to 
inventory, a feed to commissions (if sales person compensation depended 
on sales), etc. But while the whole might be considered "the business 
system" the accounting system would be a discrete part.

Michael D Novack

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