[GNC] Questions on how best to setup a non-profit account in gnucash

[David Cousens]

Larry,

As Adrien noted we connot offer accounting advice per se. However we can
give you some guidance in setting up GnuCashand using its features.

Generally you will need to create an income sub account for each source of
income you wish to be able to track, in the example you gave, for each of
the dance categories.

Similarly you will need to have an expense category for each of those dance
categories and for each of those categories a further sub account for each
of the general expense categories. This will allow you to get basic reports
like a balance sheet and income statement which will list those categories.

The Customer and Vendor business features are used for those who provide you
with goods or services and those to whom you provide goods and services.
I.e. each of your callers, the suppliers of advertising  and the hall will
be your vendors. 

You may find the accounts payable useful if you do not operate on a cash
basis only, i.e. your suppliers extend credit to you and only require
payment at the end of the month for example, but it may be overkill for the
scale of your operations. 

The Jobs business feature could be used to track particular dances as you
thought but it also would possibly be overkill. AFAIK it is designed for the
business situation where you need to track all the expenses associated for
one specific project out of many  for a given customer.

The customers are of course those who come to the dances and pay you fees.
It is unlikely that you would need to track them individually from your
description.  GnuCash has various facilities for searching for specific
information in the description field of a transaction and these can be used
to produce transaction reports which list all transactions including certain
terms to a specific account for example.

The following is an outline of a possible basic CoA for the functonality you
have described. The colons indicate subaccounts. You would normally set up
the categories as placeholder accounts. These do not have transactions
directly into them, only to the subaccounts they group, but they will allow
you to get totals of those subaccounts.

The reports in GnuCash generally have their own setups and options and you
can customize them to meet your specific requirements providing you have a
good basic account structure.

Assets:Current Assets:Checking

Income:F&F:Door
Income:F&F:Tickets
Income: DF:Door
Income: DF:Tickets
Income:JBO:Door
Income:JBO:Tickets

Expenses:F&F:Venue
Expenses:F&F:Square caller
Expenses:F&F:Round caller
Expenses:F&F:Advertising
Expenses:F&F:Miscellaneous

You would then need similar expense accounts as described above for the F&F
category for each of the two other categories.

If you include a searchable unique label for each dance in the description
field, you would be able to produce reports for each dance by setting an
appropriate period for the report and filtering using those specific labels. 
This would require you to include the appropriate label in the descriptions
for all transactions associated with a particular event.

The introductory chapters of the GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide
https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-guide/index.html
should give you a basic understanding of the accounting concepts involved. 

Your jurisdiction will normally have its own rules and regulations about the
organizational and accounting requirements for clubs and associations and
other not for profits.   This may add additional requirements on  how you
perform the accounting in addition to what I have outlined above,
particularly any reporting and auditing requirements. If you have a
participant who is an accountant you may be able to seek their help. in some
cases accountants may help out pro bono, particularly if the operation is
charitable. 

The above is one possible treatment of the situation as you described it and
not necessarily the only way to do it or even a complete description of a
suitable CoA for your organization. The best way is of course the one which
provides you with the information you need for your club's internal use and
any external requirements. GnuCash is reasonably flexible and you can
probably refine and fine tune the account structure over time as you become
more familiar with GnuCash.

David Cousens






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David Cousens
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