[GNC] Bookkeeping for a club's charity account - use business features?

Michael Hendry hendry.michael at gmail.com
Fri Aug 23 13:39:17 EDT 2019


> On 23 Aug 2019, at 14:48, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> 
> The business features certainly offer some perks with respect to reporting, reminders and info lookups.
> 
> I’d probably take that approach in some fashion if I had to tackle the problem myself.
> 
> However, if the only reason you are considering using them is simply to handle multi-dimensional reporting, consider this:
> 
> The Transaction Report (as well as some other reports) can be filtered (with regular expressions, not just with other accounts) and that report in particular can have 2 sorting dimensions with sub-totals. One could also apply a view filter to an account or run a search and then run an ‘Account Report’ from the result.
> 
> For multi-dimensional issues, I’d solve those by using the ‘Description’ field as one dimension, and the ’Notes’ and/or ‘Memo’ fields as additional dimensions. (the Action fields might also be useful here) This would be in addition to the regular ‘Account’ field as the primary dimension.
> 
> You might even be able to keep all donations in a single account or a small handful of accounts, greatly simplifying your CoA and other organization reports.
> 
> Consider booking the donations using the member name as the Description and putting the destination in the Notes or other fields. You could also track the sources such as ‘Foundation Dinners’ if you’ll have more than one, and the need to do so, in any other unused fields.
> 
> As long as you are consistent in where the information appears, a semi-custom filtered report could be achieved.
> 
> The drawback to regular transactions would be issuing reminders, but that could be accomplished by employing a ‘receivables’ type account that would be filled with scheduled transactions for each member, and then the actual payments would reduce those balances as transfers to some other account to accumulate donations YTD. (this would be a second layer of transaction info, not the tracking of actual funds moving around) You could then run a report based on such accounts.
> 
> The only drawback to this approach would be if you also needed GnuCash to double as a member ‘database’ with address, contact info, etc. In that case, making all members ‘customers’ might be the better route because such information already has a place to be stored without having to shoe-horn it into individual transactions. (but even that would be possible, and auto-fill will greatly assist with data entry)
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien

Thanks, Adrien.

Plenty of food for thought there!

I’m not desperately keen on using free text in the Description and Notes fields because minor variations in spelling might well cause a transaction to be missed, but I can see that this would greatly speed up data entry.

I’ve already set up an Asset account called “Members’ Commitments”, which will be populated (e.g.) as members commit to being paying guests at a Foundation Dinner, and then reduced to zero once a suitable date has been negotiated, the meal eaten and payment received.

I can foresee a lot of revisions going on until I settle down on a workable method.

Regards,

Michael



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