[GNC] Managing multiple vehicles

[Michael or Penny Novack]

> It's not so much filtering, more grouping of cost components by say Tractor
> using your example. I use quickbooks classes to do exactly that on
> the farm. It's an essential management feature described in
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772#c6 but it's not offered in
> GnuCash and the workarounds aren't practical. You want everything for an
> entity in one book but you need another data field to run reports against.
> Try https://kmymoney.org/ tags.

I am going to try to describe what "tags" are and do (this other data 
fields like "classes")

They are "selectors". They are letting you (if your bookkeeping app has 
this feature -- it is NOT part of standard accounting) set up in advance 
a selection of accounts for a report or reports. In other words, they 
are letting you run issue a command like run ReportA or ReportB applying 
selector Y (or X or Z)

In a standard accounting package, you do this by running ReportA (or 
ReportB) and at THAT time (not in advance) you indicate what accounts 
are to be included/excluded. If you expect to be running again with the 
same subset of accounts you can SAVE that report so you only do that 
specification of accounts once.

If it looks like a lot more work specifying the accounts remember you 
DID go through all that when you assigned the "tags" (you decided which 
accounts got tagged with that identifier).

Now if you ask me WHY accountants (and thus standard accounting) prefer 
deciding what gets included at report time (as opposed to at CoA setup 
time) I suspect it is because they expect more or less constant changes 
to the reports they are asked to produce. They prefer to do that in the 
report rather than going back to the CoA to ad a new "tag" or "class".

Let me ask you a question (since I haven't used QuickBooks for any org 
since 2006). How many "classes" can be assigned to the same account? In 
other words, can an account be a member of many different "classes"? If 
that is not possible, if only one, then it should be obvious why an 
accountant would find pretty useless.

Michael D Novack