[GNC] Setting up for restricted/unrestricted PCC accounts - what's a reasonable approach

[pobox.deva at outlook.in]

Chris,

You will find plenty of discussions on this list on restricted/unrestricted funds for charity, trust, etc. Much of the account setup also revolves around taxation in your jurisdiction, so I won’t delve into those aspects.

My comment here is restricted to your query on which account setup is the way to go as you stated in the post below…

Since GnuCash’s account hierarchy starts with 5 fundamental account types as the root accounts viz., Assets, Equity, Expenses, Income & Liabilities, you will find that your first model will be easy to tailor in your scheme of things.

If you try to set it up as per your second model, you will soon run into technical restrictions imposed by GnuCash such as certain account types cannot be child accounts of certain parents and so on. So a lot more struggle will be involved in setting that up, or in some cases, it may just not allow it at all.

Cheers,
Deva

> On 29-Aug-2020, at 3:48 PM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
> 
> Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2020 11:14:46 +0100
> From: Chris Green <cl at isbd.net <mailto:cl at isbd.net>>
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: [GNC] Setting up for restricted/unrestricted PCC accounts -
> 	what's a reasonable approach.
> Message-ID: <20200829101446.GA138604 at esprimo>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> I have installed GnuCash on my xubuntu system and I've done the
> default 'business' accounts set-up as that seems closest to what a PCC
> needs.
> 
> Now presumably I need to apply some sort of restricted/unrestricted
> account types.
> 
> It would seem that the way to go would be to split 'expenses' into
> 'restricted expenses' and 'unrestricted expenses' and, similarly have
> 'restricted income' and 'unrestricted income'.  I guess these should
> be a layer below 'expenses' and 'income' so one has:-
> 
>    expenses
>        restricted
>            church repairs
>            new church furniture etc.
>        unrestricted
>            vicar's expenses
>            CofE
>            electricity bill
> 
> ... and similar for income.
> 
> Or should one have it the other way about:- <about:->
> 
>    restricted
>        expenses
>           ...
>           ...
>        income
>           ...
>           ...
> 
>    unrestricted
>        expenses
>            ....
> 
>        income
>            ....
> 
> 
> It feels like the first is right as one can then still do overall
> expenses versus income more easily, or have I got it completely wrong
> and I shouldn't have restricted/unrestricted placeholders at all?
> 
> -- 
> Chris Green
>