[GNC] Managing Profit Centers, Enterprises, Projects

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On May 13, 2020 w20d134, at 5:10 AM, flywire <flywire0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> There is also a Jobs structure which can be used with specific projects
> and
>> allows invoices/bills to be grouped for a specific job for a single
>> customer/vendor. It is discussed in the help manual
> 
> I've reviewed that but I understand (??) it's not applicable. I'm a big fan
> of the Tutorial and Concepts Guide where the examples teach you what the
> terminology means and how to apply it.

The ‘Jobs’ feature as I understand it is a bit misnamed. It is more like a ‘purchase order’. (there’s a filed RFE on renaming it)

There is the limitation that a Job can only have *one* customer, or *one* vendor. And while a Customer Job and a Vendor Job can have the same name, they won’t be the same Job. Additionally a bill or invoice can have only one Job.

see: https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2018-August/079310.html (Derek wrote the feature, he’s explaining it to me in that thread)

It is not really a means to track revenue and expenses for a ‘project’ or client except within those very limiting circumstances. (I have a client that issues POs to Vendors but they always cover multiple orders for customers as well as for their own stock, so they can’t use the feature.)

It also doesn’t help for anything outside of issuing bills and invoices. There’s no way to manually associate transactions with Jobs as best I can tell.

> 
> Back to the camel farm. Just say you sell a sheep in Oz. If you have a road
> train full (
> https://img.izismile.com/img/img3/20100721/640/road_trains_640_26.jpg )
> then no worries, but if it's one you had better eat it because the proceeds
> wouldn't cover the bookkeeping cost. With fees, levies, industry funds,
> different tax treatments, various parties - there's 20 splits for that
> transaction (could be more if it has a lamb) so when you multiply it by the
> subaccounts, well, it's a suicide risk.
> 
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772#c6

Yes, sub-accounts (or separate trees even) can get very unwieldy very quickly even with the simplest cases. A Category/Tag feature is really the only solution that covers most if not all cases. (that legitimately belong in one book)

I’m not sure how much work it would be, but I suggested in Comment 22 on that bug to first expand the filtering option to all cells for every report. (and add the option where it doesn’t yet exist for a report, making it standard) This way, without even adding another table or tables, users can tag in any manner they wish, with as many tags as they like for even the same transaction (multi-dimensions) and be able to run reports to analyze their activity. Since this type of accounting is really about crafting reports, I figured that’s probably where the focus should be. And since Regex is already built in to the option, that is quite powerful indeed.

Later, when GnuCash becomes a proper database app, table or tables can be added to allow the user to name those other dimensions they need, and maybe even name the dimension itself and use that name in the UI where appropriate. (So that one could have a list of ‘projects’, ‘jobs’, ‘properties’, ‘relatives’, etc.)

Regards,
Adrien