[GNC] Change account type by editing XML?

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Thu Apr 30 14:58:24 EDT 2020


That’s quite an undertaking.

The business features probably won’t be able to help since you need to group members by team as well as you noted.

The member accounts can still be treated as ‘other receivables’ and even be under the A/R account. They just should be of type ‘asset’ instead of type A/R. A/R itself is just an asset account. GnuCash has it as a special type for use with the business features. Note that the internal GnuCash ’type’ isn’t necessarily tied to where it is in the tree, though generally those go hand in hand. For example, I have an ‘Accrued Revenue’ account as type ‘asset’ and it is a child of ‘Accounts Receivable’ which is of type ‘A/R’.

If you need to track funds received as allocated to a team, that should probably be modeled as sub-accounts of the main bank account. (as segregated assets, not liabilities) But the individual members would still be receivables. (they can be grouped under placeholder parent accounts representing the teams if needed)

Are you experiencing some problems with GnuCash with the current setup? If the reporting otherwise works, it may not be strictly necessary to change it. If you aren’t using the business features at all, I don’t see why the member accounts can’t stay where they are even as 'type' A/R.

On the editing front, have you tried doing a test edit of the account type to see if something breaks? (on a copy of the file of course)


Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 30, 2020 w18d121, at 1:33 PM, david whiting <dw at davidwhiting.me.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> The "why" has two components: 1) what I am trying to model, and 2) the
> circumstances and context around when I set things up.
> 
> 1) What I'm trying to model
> 
> These are the accounts for a local football club that consists of
> about 450 members playing for 25 teams. Each members pays annual subs,
> the amount of which is different for each team because there are some
> costs that are generic across the club and others that are options
> selected by the different teams. Members pay a (re)sign-on fee at the
> beginning of the season, then six monthly payments. I then spend the
> rest of the season chasing those who have not kept up with payments.
> Most members now pay by bank transfer.
> 
> Each year about 100 members leave (they stop playing or join another
> club) and about 100 new members join.
> 
> Each team seeks sponsorship and has its own account within the
> accounts and can spend that money how it likes (more kit, equipment,
> BBQ, whatever). I have placed these accounts in Liabilities.
> 
> I need to be able to produce statements (transaction reports) for each
> member each month and for each team, so each member needs to be
> associated with a team. Grouping members by team in the chart of
> accounts makes it easier to find the relevant accounts quickly because
> I normally need to deal with issues team by team.
> 
> 2) The context
> 
> The context for when I set this up was: I had just taken over as
> treasurer after a year when the accounts had been managed very poorly.
> There were many disagreements about what had been paid (at that time
> many transactions were in cash, collected by team managers and passed
> on to the treasurer). There was no formal list of members so it was
> hard to know who should be paying. This was after six years where the
> previous treasurer had produced no balance sheet or profit and loss
> statement, just an annual listing of all cheques written and the bank
> balance. I needed to set something up quickly to restore confidence. I
> knew of gnucash but have no training in accounts. I met with the
> parent of one player who was an accountant one evening over a few
> beers and we talked about how to set things up (I suspect this is not
> the standard way that accountants are trained). I made notes, and read
> (some of) the gnucash manual but there were clearly many things I did
> not fully understand, one of which was the correct way to set up the
> members in gnucash.
> 
> I recognise now that the members are effectively customers, but I
> don't think I could make gnucash work for me to deal with so many
> customers each month. If I have to process payments for each customer
> it would take too long. I need to be able to produce member and team
> statements and I don't think I can do that for batch of customers.
> Treating them as people who owe money and simply creating asset
> accounts works because the import matching works well for matching
> payments to members and I can create a transaction report that I can
> then post-process into individual statements with a script.
> 
> So my fundamental mistake was creating these accounts under A/R when I
> should have created them under assets. Getting them out is now my
> mission.
> 
> David




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