Record income/ expense from side gig

[DaveC49]

Hi Chris,

That seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. There can be two obvious
reasons for recording income/expenses from a particular source separately
from other sources of income. 

1. You need to do it for tax purposes and are required to separately
identify the sources of income or business activities. This is a likely
requirement if your side gig is a separate business activity. The tax and
business laws and business regulations applying where you are carrying out
your business determine the level of detail you will be required to keep.

2. The information on the separate sources of income is useful to you in
managing those activities and determining whether they provide you with a
net financial benefit and optimizing that financial benefit.

Depending on the scale of the activity and the costs of doing so, it may
also be desirable to separate it completely from your other activities, i.e.
maintain separate bank accounts and books just for that activity. This can
simplify the record keeping. At the least if you are using a single set of
books separate all accounts for the activity as you suggested using sub
accounts. 

I have experimented with creating top level entity placeholders in Gnucash,
but the new account dialogue does not allow creation of a placeholder which
doesn't have an account type and if you create a placeholder account with a
specific type , e.g.  Asset the options for sub accounts are limited to
types relevant for asset accounts, i.e. you cannot create sub-accounts of
type Income ,Expense or Liability as sub accounts of a placeholder Asset
account. there was a thread some time ago also discussing whether this was
possible

The only way to do it  in a single book is as you suggested with sub
accounts for the business activity as required.under each of the major
account headings. I do this without any problem for a small side business my
wife has within a single set of books for our combined personal activities
and because you can limit reports to a specific
selection of accounts, I have no problem producing basic business reports
required for tax etc. , just for that specific activity.
Hope this helps

Best wishes

David Cousens



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