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

[Adrien Monteleone]

I’m in agreement with Stan here.

I too setup a separate 'Travel' placeholder account with children for different items such as transportation, food, lodging, etc.

If I really want to see how much I spent on fuel for any purposes, I just include the relevant accounts on one report.

Another option would be to ’tag’ the vacation expenses with something like ‘Vacation’ in the Notes or Memo fields. (Action fields may be of use here also, but I haven’t tested that)

Then run a Transaction Report for all expense accounts and use the filtering option to include only transactions with that tag in the appropriate field.

This allows you to keep the transaction entry fairly simple and all fuel expenses in one place, but you get to run reports showing how much you spent on vacation as well. (and they would be broken down by account, so you see that info too)

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jan 28, 2020 w5d28, at 5:15 AM, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.