Simple beginner help

Mark Phillips mark at phillipsmarketing.biz
Mon Oct 13 20:44:22 EDT 2014


Sean,

You will end up with a massive chart of accounts....and spend a lot of time
allocating pennies to different buckets. You may loose site of the forest
as you count the needles on the pine trees.

You could set up expenses with lots of sub accounts - organized by location
(restaurant, grocery store, etc) and then specific item (dinner, lunch,
milk, coffee, etc.). You can go as deep as you want. The advantage of this
method is you get a roll-up of the totals from the lower levels of your
massive spending tree.

For example:

Expenses - Groceries - Milk - Safeway, Walmart, Costco, etc.

or

Expenses - Groceries - Safeway - Milk, Coffee, Beans, Tuna

Then, when you enter a Safeway receipt, just pick the Groceries - Safeway -
Milk account for your milk expense.

All grocery spending rolls up to the top - Groceries, and each sub account
will roll up with a sub total for Safeway, then Milk.

When you run a P&L report, make sure you tell the report configuration how
many levels deep you want to display.

I would keep at least a six pack around when you enter the spending
information......seems very tedious. ;)

It is none of my business, but I am curious why you want to know how much
you spend on milk at Safeway versus Walmart at the end of the
month/quarter/year. If you are looking for the best price, wouldn't it be
easier to check the prices on the Internet before you go shopping?

Mark

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 6:52 AM, Sean Clarke <seanchk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm new to GnuCash having just installed it last night.
>
> Already I'm very confused as I can't seem to figure out how I use it.
>
> What I want to do is pretty simple (I think), I want to keep track of all
> my spending so for example today I had my haircut, had some lunch with a
> friend and then went to the grocery store and purchased a few items.
>
>
> How do I enter a transaction that shows not only how much I spent on lunch
> but where I ate, so at the end of the month (or whenever) I can see how
> much money I spent during the period at each different restaurant?
>
> How do I record the different items I purchased in the grocery store and
> which store it was so I can see how much I spend in different stores and
> how much (for example) I spend each month on Milk?
>
> I've managed to do very basic money in / money out transactions but I can't
> figure out the extra step of linking a transaction to a store (very
> important) or breaking down a grocery store receipt into items.
>
> Is this even possible?
>
> Thanks all,
>
> Sean
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