[GNC] Job Costing as now available

[Mike Butcher]

Don, have you seen any response to this message or find a solution
otherwise? I too need this function in a big way. Making a new account for
every order is horribly messy and cumbersome. It's been a year and a half
and I was hoping someone on the development team might have an answer. I
love GNUcash for my personal life but cannot use it for business without
some form of jobcosting.  I have to reenter info into a database I
assembled for that.

Take care,
~Mike Butcher

On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 4:04 PM doncram <doncram at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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