Recording non-cash donations

[Mike or Penny Novack]

On 2/13/2018 10:56 AM, Rich Shepard wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   For tax purposes non-cash donations of goods and services are 
> deductible.
> I would like to track those as an account (or off-setting accounts) in
> gnucash and do not find how best to do this in the guide or help docs. 
> I'm
> open to suggestions on how to track these transactions.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rich 
Clarify your question for us.

Are you asking "can I use gnucash to track this?" (yes) or "can I easily 
do this WITHIN my main gnucash books? (maybe not, and probably not 
simply, easily, etc.(

Remember, for reporting purposes, you still will be reporting these 
donations in terms of dollars. You will want to have some way of 
noting/marking which require the additional substantiating paperwork.

Since I do NOT use guncash for personal accounting (no personal "regular 
books") but do normally itemize and so need to track donations I do have 
a "virtual" Donations set of books. In my case, I also want to get a 
report that shows me not only total donations but which organizations on 
our "get an annual donation" have received theirs, for this I use a 
"funny" set of books that has ONLY accounts of type "income" and 
"expense". The income side has "by check", "by cash", and "in kind" and 
the expense side a tree of receiving entities. We wan to track 
non-deductible donations too, so those two categories are the main 
parents, deductible further broken into types of organizations, 
non-deductible into simple non 501(c) 3 ("informal entities", "beggars", 
"unknown status") and "PAC".

The only report I need to run against this is an "Income Statement"

As it happens, we make only trivial "in kind" donations", but if we were 
doing some substantial ones (that needed individual documentation) I 
would have split the "in kind" on the income side between those that did 
and those that didn't. Since these NOT by check, could always use the 
number field to mark when the documentation was in hand.

Michael D Novack

PS: I use guncash for other sorts of "virtual" entities. For example, 
one that treats our solar system AS IF it were an entity that had income 
and expenses, was operating on borrowed money on which it was paying 
interest as well as paying the loan back, and which later, perhaps, will 
be paying dividends after the loan is paid off. Additional expenses are 
things like its share of our property insurance, estimated affect on our 
taxes, etc. Income items are things like tax credits, credits to our 
electric bill, sale of SRECs (being taxable, would be an example of part 
of that going for an expense).

      MOST examples you see for solar systems discuss "payback" as if 
money were free of interest and/or there were no effects on other 
expenses. I wanted one which was realistic about a normal rate on a 20 
year fixed mortgage,other expenses, etc. I chose 4%, which at the time 
was GOOD for 20 year fixed, taxable interest, loan and this would 
actually be an internal (non-taxable) loan so really equivalent to AAA 
and ~5%

     But looking at that set of books, not obvious "virtual" as 
otherwise appear more or less normal. Just that there ISN'T such an entity.