Farmer Question

[R. Victor Klassen]

I’ve used GnuCash for farm accounting for several years now.  It is quite normal for farm expenses to get interspersed with personal. 
As with Quicken, you assign different categories/accounts to different lines in a purchase if some are farm/business and some are personal.

With GnuCash they’re called accounts, whereas you’ll be used to calling them categories.

So long as your business categories are distinct from your personal categories, you can run Income Statements and Transaction reports, selecting only business accounts or only personal accounts.   So while your finances will be thoroughly entwined with each other, the reports will separate them.  For all of your purchases from any checking account or credit card account there’s the accounts on the other side, and that’s where you get to separate business from personal.   I recommend using account names straight off the applicable tax forms, possibly with sub-accounts if you want finer grained information.  

If you want to generate invoices that automatically calculate taxes you should enable the business features.  Otherwise you can do that part outside of GnuCash and put the different parts into a split transaction when you go to put it in GnuCash.

> 
>> I've used Quicken for years and am considering switching to gnucash mainly
>> because Quicken is going to a subscription pay model and I don't want to be
>> held hostage by it or by an operating system (I always have in the back of
>> my mind to swithc from Windows to Linux).  I know little of accounting.  In
>> reading the manuals, I have a number of questions about setting up the
>> gnucash system.
>> 
>> 1.  I have several checking accounts and use them all for both personal
>> and business use.  It seems unfeasible to set up two sets of books.
>> Can/how do I separate personal from business in one set of books?
>> 
>> 2.  I have several credit cards, use them the same way as checking.  How
>> do I set up several credit card sub accounts, e.g., notional names AB Visa,
>> CD Mastercard, EF Visa, etc., and separate purchases for business and
>> personal?
>> 
>> 3.  I do all my data entry manually and am not going to change.
>> 
>> 4.  I have several income streams, including farming, flight instruction,
>> writing, custom farming (e.g., mowing or plowing for someone else),
>> military retirement, social security benefits.  Some are business and some
>> are personal.  Any thing to consider when I set them up?
>> 
>> As I see it, my main uncertainties are about mixing personal and business
>> and about having a number of different accounts of the same type that are
>> used for both personal and business (i.e., checking and credit cards).
>> 
>> It occurs to me that if  I have to ask these questions the prospect of
>> using double-entry bookkeeping may be more than I should attempt.  If you
>> think that is the case feel free to say so.  I'm trying to figure out if I
>> want to go this way.  I tried QuickBooks about 8-10 years ago and gave it
>> up after a couple of months.  I have the time and energy to put in, just
>> not sure if I'm smart enough.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Jim
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