[GNC] accounts setup (how to duplicate same payment in two expense accounts)

[Stan Brown]

On 2020-01-27 08:28, malam via gnucash-user wrote:
> In a particular case, I would like to assign a simple payment to two
> different expense categories (both 100%, not splitting the payment).
> 
> For example: During the vacation I spend 50$ on gasoline. This goes
> from my cash account to car expenses. At the end of the year GC shows
> total car expenses. This works as expected. But at the same time I
> would like to have the data of total expenses for the vacations.
Think about this for a minute. If you do this, then when you total up
your expense categories it will be $50 higher than the actual total
because that $50 for vacation gasoline got counted twice.

My own practice is to count gasoline bought on vacation as a vacation
expense. You could decide it the other way, but I'm pretty sure that you
can't do count it as both, because you shouldn't.

One option, which I don't recommend, would be to have a separate
account, "Vacation Gasoline". Then your present Gasoline account would
become a mere placeholder, with Vacation Gasoline and Non-Vacation
Gasoline under it so that your reports would automatically compute the
total gasoline. You could then manually add Vacation Gasoline and
Vacation to find out how much your vacation cost.

Another option, which I also don't recommend, is to use the SQL backend
and run queries to pull information from a single entry into two categories.

Personally, I think both are awfully over-complicated, especially given
that the amount of money spent on gasoline during vacation is probably a
small part of the expense of the vacation and probably a small part of
the annual expense of gasoline.

-- 
Regards,
Stan Brown
Tompkins County, New York, USA
https://BrownMath.com
http://OakRoadSystems.com