[GNC] Veihicle mileage cost such in HomeBank?

Mike or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com
Sat Aug 25 18:16:00 EDT 2018


On 8/25/2018 2:32 PM, Riccardo Delpopolo Carciopolo wrote:
> Hello Rich,
>
> thank you for the extended explanation!
> I think I would end to use a simple spreadsheet as you suggest.
>
> Regards
>
HOWEVER (since this might be useful for others)

I use a spreadsheet for mileage since we want to be able to have totals 
by category. Medical and non-profit for taxes and we track civic and 
political too just to see how much driving we do for those. That few 
number of columns easy to do/print from a spread sheet.

In spite of the fact that gnucash is an accounting package, this could 
provide a simple example of using  "virtual books". Imagine for just a 
moment that there was a country whose currency was "miles". You could 
set up a very funny partial set of books. Instead of fundamental types 
asset, liability, equity, income, and expense suppose you did away with 
all but income and expense (technically those are of fundamental type 
equity). Under Income would be just a single account called "total 
miles". Under Expense would be an account for each mileage category you 
wanted to track plus one miscellaneous for other trips. The only report 
you would run would be the income statement. Your transactions are just 
total miles (income) allocated to the category (expense) << a single 
trip MIGHT need a split if for more than one purpose >>

If you only have a few categories, I'd use a spread sheet. But those can 
be annoying when MANY columns wide. Let's suppose that you did 
contracting jobs, perhaps a dozen or two every year, or even more. And 
suppose each of these had mileage associated with it. And suppose you 
wanted to track all of this << see how much mileage for each job" >>  
Now using gnucash in the "funny" way might seem attractive.

Michael

Michael D Novack



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