Need help tracking monthly bills

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 12/3/2016 10:50 PM, Chris via gnucash-user wrote:
> Hi, I recently switched from using Excel spreadsheets to GNUCASH to
> manage and track household finances. The learning curve has been
> difficult but not impossible and I now have a more comprehensive view of
> of everything.
>
> Now to my problem. Our monthly bills come in various formats and some
> like the home mortgage don't send monthly statements at all. I have a
> tendency to forget which have been paid........
>
> The closest I have come is using a transaction report but it only
> provides half of what I need........ Ideally It would show the one's not paid as
> zero for this month.
>
> As I'm new I suspect I am missing something simple or some feature I
> haven't explored yet so any help would be appreciated.
You can use the report called Income Statement for this (aka Profit & 
Loss aka Statement of Revenues and Expenses).

a) You can set the date range for this report to be whatever you want.
b) You can select what accounts to include or not.
       So ......
You set the date range for the month and select those expense accounts 
where you expect a non-zero total. I suggest you also select the income 
accounts where you expect a non-zero total (did some income item not 
show up?)

I use something similar for a different purpose. While I keep books for 
organizations under gnucah I don't keep personal books. BUT we donate a 
fair bit to charities (and also non tax deductible donations) and this 
is mainly by an annual plan, which organizations get and how much. This 
I track in a set of pseudo books using gnucash (just "income" and 
"expense" accounts, Income being gross donations broken into check, 
cash, kind, and donations into deductible and non-deductible parents 
with the organizations first by category and then individually. Easy to 
see from running the "Income Statement" how much we have given o far in 
the year, and which organizations haven't yet gotten their annual 
donation << and then at the end, have the deductible total for our 
taxes, but also know our actual total of donations.

The only real difference is that the time interval isn't a month but a 
year. If I WERE keeping personal books, this would be part of them and I 
could produce the same report by selecting just some accounts for the 
report.

Michael D Novack