Help: Research group accounting

Jędrzej Pełka jedrzej.pelka at 10g.pl
Mon Jul 6 11:41:36 EDT 2015


Hello!

There is a small research group, which runs various experiments on human subjects. The subjects are paid for the amount of time they spent participating. I wonder if it would be reasonable to use GnuCash to track what the research group owes/pays/gets from the subjects.

Detailed description of the "business logic" of the research group:

1. There is a pool of registered subjects, each has a unique ID number. (Should they be accounted as "employees" or rather as "customers"? Or maybe "vendors"?)

2. Each time a subject participates, she/he is credited an amount of minutes. (I know that minutes can be defined as a custom "fund" in GnuCash.)

3. After a subject has collected a sufficient amount of minutes, they can come and withdraw their balance in form of cash (at a fixed exchange rate e.g. 0,15 USD for each minute of experiment participation).
The professor pays the subjects from his own pocket, collects signed receipts and gets later reimbursed by the university.

4. Alternatively, at her/his own wish, the subject may exchange part of their balance for a volunteering certificate, stating they participated for a given amount of time unpaid.

I'm a beginner and this case of business is rather unusual compared to most GnuCash tutorials. May somebody suggest a proper scheme for accounting this?

Best regards,
JP




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list