accounting categories

[Adrien Monteleone]

Jeff,

It’s also called the same in English.

It might have various names for different industries.

I’ve seen ‘Activity/Cost/Profit Center’ accounting as an alternative.

I’ve done some research on this method of P&L presentation and I think I prefer it to the traditional approach.

It will require you to spread certain fixed costs out to each center of activity/profit based on whatever meets your needs and makes the most sense for your organization. Some choose to apply this equally to each, some try to do a one-time analysis to see what costs go where and use a % factor after that.

Certainly, as they presently stand, GnuCash P&L/Income reports are not designed to facilitate this, but it might be possible to write a custom one.

The bigger hang-up is that GnuCash itself is not geared for this extra dimension of analysis. I’ve seen a thread or two on the subject in the last year or so. Check the archives.

At best, I would say investigate the utility of using ‘Jobs’ in GnuCash. This might provide *some* of the functionality you are looking for. You can ‘charge back’ expenses to certain customers and apply both invoices and bills to certain jobs. But what is odd is that Jobs can only have one vendor. So far, this has been a deal-breaker for me. I understand a job having only one customer, but only one vendor seems a bit too restrictive and not quite ‘real-world.’ (it is certainly possible to have incurred expenses billed by multiple vendors on behalf of doing a job for one customer)

The budget system in GnuCash is even more restrictive. I don’t think anything besides accounts are accessible. (you couldn’t budget for a particular ‘job’ that is) You CAN create as many different budgets that you want spanning different periods and using different accounts with special amounts for each. In that respect, I suppose you could create custom budgets for each project but I’m not sure how transactions would be segregated in the budget report since any such report will likely include ALL transactions from any particular account for each budget period. I don’t think there is a ‘filter’ option for the budget report in other words. (so you couldn’t run a budget report for the ‘regatta’ budget and see only expenses tagged with ‘regatta’ which makes the report meaningless)

I’ve seen attempts that create special individual accounts for each project but I would think that could get quite messy, especially for transient one-off projects.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Dec 14, 2017, at 1:53 PM, Jeff Abrahamson <jeff at p27.eu> wrote:
> 
> I'm starting to use gnucash for my rowing club.  We'd like to track
> certain projects independently: each race that we go to, a regatta that
> we run here at home, the activities of various committees.  Some of
> these categories overlap (the students have their own budget but also
> participate in races).  I'd like to create budgets for each tracked
> activity (as well, of course, as an inclusive budget for the entire
> club).  And then I'd like to tag income and expenses for each tracked
> activity so that I can watch P&L relative to budget for each.
> 
> In French, I would do what I literally translate as analytical
> accounting.  (Conceptually, it's just tagging items.)  I've not found
> reference to this in the docs, but maybe it's called something else in
> English.
> 
> Is there support for this in gnucash?  Or have others found useful
> work-arounds?
> 
> I can easily see a hack (adding tags in the descriptions I enter and
> then processing certain reports with python).  But it would be quite
> nice to stay within gnucash if I can.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Jeff Abrahamson
> +33 6 24 40 01 57
> +44 7920 594 255
> 
> http://p27.eu/jeff/
> 
> 
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