Multiple Files

E Rosenberg wmcomputersystems at gmail.com
Mon Mar 21 01:27:02 EDT 2016


Michael -

EXCELLENT!!

One more....

Big school has many programs; eg, sports, sports, etc

Each has its own checkbook.

I'd like to have one gnucash file, rather than a separate file for
each checkbook, and be able to sort and report on each checkbook.

How?

TIA

Ethan

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Mike or Penny Novack
<mpnovack at mtdata.com> wrote:
> On 3/15/2016 12:02 AM, E Rosenberg wrote:
>>
>> Michael -
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Big School..
>>
>> Let us say that it has three accounts, Maintenance, Tuition, Student
>> Activities.
>>
>> It wishes to see the accounting for each of the accounts and to have
>> the accounts combined into one account.  It wishes tjo see Income,
>> Expenses for all four accounts. accounts.
>>
>> TIA
>>
>> Ethan
>
> OK, now for the next question (answer will help us advise)
>
> Wants to see (in the "main books") those income and expense transactions
> individually or just summarized? To use Maintenance as an example, would
> those at the top level handling the financial affairs of the school want to
> see each transaction for an order of wall washing detergent or just the
> summary total? << and only if there were a question about "why are we
> spending so much on cleaning supplies" ask for a report on the details >>
>
> Before making up your mind how to proceed, you might look at an example of
> "subsidiary books" like "petty cash". This would have been common in the old
> days, a main set of books dealing with the organization as a whole but
> subsidiary books keeping track of the details so that the main books weren't
> cluttered with them (and errors, in the old days not uncommon, kept more
> isolated, thus easier to find and correct).
>
> There is a price to pay, the extra transactions connecting the books
> (bringing the totals into the main books and transferring replenishment
> funds, etc.) But that sort of thing would have been done perhaps just
> monthly, relatively low volume.
>
> Take Tuition for another example. You would want to have a level of detail
> there as to who has paid their tuition, who still owes ("customer data").
> But the Board of the school would only be interested in things at the level
> of "total tuition income", "amount of tuition unpaid and owing", etc. and
> not the name/address of each student who still owes.
>
> I am NOT saying that you can't specify reports running against a unified set
> of books to produce only the level of detail wanted. Just that you need to
> weigh the work alternatives, simpler reports vs the work of monthly or
> quarterly adjustments between a primary set of books and subsidiary books.
>
> Michael
>
> PS: There are also questions about "security". Who is going to be doing the
> work? If all on one bookkeeper/treasurer, no difference. But if different
> people, then you need to ask things like "why should the person who is
> maintaining the Tuition books have access to the Maintenance books or be
> able to see who is getting paid how much in Payroll?" If kept separated,
> only the head bookkeeper/treasurer having access to all (does the
> adjustments/transfers) then it is easy to restrict access by file.


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list