Best way to manage utilities

Ian Konen iankonen at gmail.com
Fri May 9 06:31:23 EDT 2014


Jim's suggestion was good too: If you're not overly concerned with
getting the actual sorting, organizing or calculating capabilities,
just using the notes column with a transaction might be enough.  The
numbers are not  easily accessible for sorting, averaging, etc,
because it's just a "dumb" text field, but it would be logically
associated with each bill and you can see an overview easily enough
with the accounts tab or in a transaction report.

Oddly enough, that's already what I've done with my utility bills in
the past (I'm not very good about keeping up on it, but I can still
find old bills with usage online) but I guess I assumed you were
looking for a more sophisticated analysis.

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 12:15 PM, Alberto Dante <alberto.dante at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> in truth, It has never been a my preoccupation if my demands are framed in a
> context of rigorous accounting system.
> Unfortunately, I'm not a professional accounter, and my goal is to find a
> software which fits my needs, nothing else.
> When I started my search, I couldn't image it so hard.
> I think I'll have to modify my goal...
> Thanks to you and all other users for your help.
> Best regards
> Alberrto
>>
>>      We might of course be having some language difficulties. I was NOT
>> suggesting that you use an inventory system. I was just trying to point
>> out that there were a lot of things we might be wanting to keep track of
>> besides MONEY. What an accounting system does, what it is supposed to
>> do, is keep track of money, not other things. You are expecting gnucash
>> to perhaps do things OTHER than what an accounting system is designed to
>> do. I chose "inventory" as an example because an inventory system (in a
>> business environment) would have a TIE to the accounting system, whether
>> an automated tie or not depending on how well the two systems,
>> "inventory" and "accounting" were connected.
>>
>>      So yes of course, just as in the case of a proposed inventory system
>> that would tie to gnucash, there could be one that would do what you
>> want, one that would do "project" accounting or "time" accounting (for
>> those businesses that so "billable hours") or "commissions" (for those
>> businesses whose sales people work on commission), etc. But ALL of these
>> would be in effect separate projects needing their own development
>> teams. WHY? Because in all likelihood, even if particularly friendly to
>> gnucash (primarily intended to work with gnucash) it would be foolish if
>> these systems did not make provision to connect to other popular
>> accounting systems.
>>
>> Michael D Novack
>>
>> PS: That you might have seen these with other (commercial) accounting
>> software may have confused you to the extent you saw them as "part of"
>> it. Many vendors of commercial accounting packages may offer for
>> purchase add ons like a "point of sales" package that connects to their
>> "inventory" package" and both their "accounting "package" (and maybe
>> "tax preparation" packages for some of the more popular jurisdictions).
>> Being commercial vendors, they have no interest in making these optional
>> packages tie in to the accounting systems of competitors. That still
>> does not make these add ons PART of the accounting system.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  *
>>
>>
>
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