[GNC] Job Costing as now available

[doncram]

Hi, I recently installed and am using GnuCash (Version: 3.10 / Build ID:
3.10+(2020-04-11), on Windows). I am happy to see some functionality for
Job Costing has been added in recent years.  This is very important to
develop so that many more small businesses could possibly use GnuCash.  But
what is available vs. what is missing and critically needed?

Job Costing allows for projects to be defined for, say, construction firms
building individual houses, or catering firms doing catering jobs, or
manufacturing firms building batches of product.  Or it allows a nonprofit
or business to define a job for a specific grant or other restricted
funding source.  And then to track and match the revenues and expenses
specific to each project.

This is terribly important so that management can attempt to figure out
which jobs have been more profitable and why.  And I have seen arriving
users turned away from GnuCash (e.g. a catering firm a few years ago)
because it has been so clear that GnuCash can't serve them.  The catering
firm needed to do separate accounting & reports for each job, but if i
recall correctly was told that it should do it by creating new accounts
specific to each job.  So its Chart of Accounts would grow longer and
longer as its Sales and various Expense types of accounts would have to be
duplicated for each repetitive client/job.  It would need to create a new
account, e.g. Sales-Job#013 for the payments it received for job number 13,
and a new Food purchases-Job#13 and a new Labor-Job#13 etc. for each of its
standard type of expenses.  This would rapidly become totally unworkable,
and it does not allow for side-by-side comparison of
revenues/expenses/profitability of jobs, so of course the catering person
went away.  And for existing firms that do use GnuCash but have not tracked
separate projects/jobs to date, many of them could benefit if they could be
allowed to start doing so.

In the current stable version of GnuCash, it is now possible to create
jobs.  For example, I created a "test b company" with several expense
transactions, and created a "job1" underneath "customer A".  I can't see
yet how to assign job codes to any specific revenue or expense item.  In
any account register, a new Customer:Job column needs to appear, where I
would enter the relevant job for each line ("split"). I should not be
_required_ to enter anything into the Customer:Job column, but for any
split where I do want to assign the expense or revenue to a specific job, I
should be able to do so.  And, say if I pay $200 to one contractor for work
done on two jobs, I would create two splits, one for each job, and record,
say $120 of contractor expense for job#13 and $80 for job #14.

Then I want/need an Income Statement By Job report, which would be a
regular Income Statement in its first columns, and would report
job-specific income statements for each job in following columns.  So this
would possibly become a very wide report, but that is okay by me, as long
as I can scroll over to see any specific job.  And like for other reports,
I should be able to set Options / Display to show only the rows where there
is any non-zero data, and also only the columns where there is any non-zero
data (so in a report for Fiscal Year 2020, I don't have to see a column for
a job completed in 2018).

The only report I find, though, is the one at Reports/Business/Job, which
turns out to be some kind of Aging of Receivables report for just one job.
Instead of allowing me to run this report for all jobs (like should be
available in a general Aging of Receivables report, that should be able to
report on each customer and, for customers with more than one job, for each
job), it makes me pick just one job.

And I get only the following report (formatted more nicely than reflected
here):

Job Report: job1

test b company
05/23/2020
customer A
101 main st

Date Range: 01/01/2020 - 12/31/2020
Date Due Date Reference Type Description Amount
Total Due $0.00
0-30 days 31-60 days 61-90 days 91+ days
$0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00

Yikes, that is not what Job Costing is, at all!  Has better functionality
been added in unstable new versions of GnuCash?  If not, could it please be
added quickly?  (allow assignment of job code to any split, allow reporting
of Balance Sheet By Job and Income Statement By Job, allow budgeting to be
broken out by job, too)

I am, by the way, using job costing for the books (not in GnuCash) of a
501c3 nonprofit, to budget and track the programs/projects/jobs that the
board wants to specifically know about for any reason, and definitely to
track the funds received and expenditures of any restricted funding.

Is it obvious that Job Costing functionality must be developed?   Or am I
missing something about how it is actually more available than I can see so
far?

sincerely
Don Cram