[GNC] Managing multiple vehicles

[davidcousens49 at gmail.com]

Fernando,

The purpose you are using the information for will determine the optimal
structure of the chart of accounts. Some information will be primarily for
taxation and business records and other information you will likely use
primarily for management purposes. How you access and use that information will
be another factor - do you need formal reports or just need to look at the data.

It is likely you will need to record depreciation of the vehicles as assets for
tax purposes which would be best done with separate asset sub accounts for each
vehicle.

For the expenses you could create a sub account structure for each type of
expense under a subaccount for each vehicle or for each type of expense have a
sub-account for each vehicle. I personally 
would favour the former as it would allow you to see what each vehicle is
costing you and help with the decisions to replace vehicle.

The alternative of attaching tags in the description field associated with each
vehicle has the disadvantage that AFAIK there is no filtering on such tags
available in the report structures, whereas you can select the number of levels
and which accounts are included which would enable reports to be setup for each
vehicle.  You can use the Edit->Find menu option to search for all transactions
containing a specific tag and use the search results transferred to a
spreadsheet as the basis for a custom report however but there is more work and
it has to be repeated each time you want a report.

David Cousens

On Thu, 2022-02-03 at 16:41 -0300, Fernando Castro wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I'm having a rather intense discussion with a friend on a topic that might
> be common knowledge to most people with accounting experience, and since we
> are both newbies on accounting and GnuCash, I decided to ask around.
> 
> We are working on a GnuCash file to keep up with expenses and incomes of a
> farm. This farm has over 10 vehicles that we'd like to keep track of gas,
> maintenance and tax expenses. From my point of view creating accounts and
> subaccounts for this (no matter the hierarchy you chose) would be
> unmanageable and full of redundancy. This also represents only a small
> fraction of the farm's finance, but it is important being able to produce a
> chart with gas expenses for each vehicle.
> 
> I've read that using other softwares one can benefit from "category" to
> better filter the information you want and create reports, I've tried using
> the description field for that using a simple structure like Expenses:Gas
> and placing the vehicle details as description but it just doesn't work, or
> maybe I'm doing something wrong?
> 
> I've also considered making accounts for the vehicles as assets, but
> honestly I have no idea if this would be a viable solution and even correct
> from an accounting point of view...
> 
> Does anyone have any tips on how to go about it?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Fernando
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