One account for both Income and Expenses possible?

[Jeff Abrahamson]

On 11/02/18 15:03, Robert Heller wrote:
>
> I expect that the OP wants to have an account that represents his stock of
> vegetables (or whatever). He can actually do that. What you do is think of the
> vegetables as a kind of currency or comodity or inventory, that is the
> vegetables themselves are an asset (Assets:vegetables). Then when you sell
> vegetables the vegetable account is redued and when you buy vegetables the
> vegetable account is increased. This happens by transactions which transfer
> "money" from the vegetable account to a bank account (income when you sell
> vegetables) and when you transfer money from a bank account to the vegetable
> account (an expense when you buy vegetables). *I* do this which my inventory
> of thumb drives. GnuCash does not have "inventory" accounts or any way of
> dealing with inventory as such -- the two "features GnuCash lacks are payroll
> and inventory management features. Payroll processing is a huge process (not
> trivial to implement) but inventory management can be "faked" by considering
> inventory as if it were a currency of sorts, by just having an account with a
> balance representing the value of the inventory, which then goes up or down as
> inventory is bought or sold. Since he is a farm, I expect he is growing
> vegetables, so things are slightly more tricky. Maybe it might be useful to
> think of his farm like Bitcoin mining -- maybe someone with that sort of
> experience can describe how to represent a Bitcoin currency and how to
> represent the mining process -- one would do the same with growing vegetables
> somehow.

That is enticing, and I've contemplated doing the same.  But, unlike a
currency, which is a durable form of value that (except for currency
traders) does not constitute P&L, the vegetables also should show up in
income and expense accounts.  I'd really love to have our inventory show
up in our accounting system, but it's even more important to have our
income and expenses show up, and it seems to be either/or.

    buy inventory         bank [cx] -> expense [dx]
    (add value)
    sell inventory        income [cx] -> bank [dx]

or faking it with currencies

    buy inventory         bank [cx] -> inventory [dx]
    (add value)
    sell inventory        inventory [cx] -> bank [dx]

Except in this second case, only my balance sheet changes, not my P&L.

Did I miss something?

(This is moving away from OP, but a common theme here and one that I'd
like to understand.)

-- 

Jeff Abrahamson
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