[GNC] Job Costing as now available

Sat Aug 21 13:32:39 EDT 2021

I'll respond now: No, nothing like that has been contributed nor is it being contemplated by any of the core devs AFAIK. Well designed and written pull requests welcome.

Regards,
John Ralls

> On Aug 21, 2021, at 9:42 AM, Mike Butcher <butcherm at wowway.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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