[GNC] Managing multiple vehicles

[davidcousens49 at gmail.com]

In principle, GnuCash has the basic facility for setting this up in the form of
the key-value pair structure as far as the transaction data structure goes. With
this you could add tags/classes/categories to the transaction data structure
fairly simply. With a key "Tag" or similar  and whatever values the user wishes
to assign to this field.

The bulk of implementation would however be the display, saving (finding all
tags on loading the data file?/database equivalent) and reading and manipulation
(new delete edit list tags), use in register filtering and use in the Find
transaction for the register display and then the report setup to use this
facility.  Considerations like not blowing out the initial file load time come
into play. 

Would you display/edit tags in the register for an account? Or a right click on
a transaction with an option to, add an existing tag from a drop down list
(limited to the tags used in the open register or all possible tags?) or create
a new tag.

The auto assignment of tags based on prior usage requires a setup equivalent to
the Bayesian matching of accounts which could be used as a model for
implementation. I would get the basic stuff out of the way and working before
even considering implementing this though.

I would also leave any implementation of use in reports until the basic stuff
had been implemented and was working.

David Cousens

On Sun, 2022-02-06 at 09:00 +1100, flywire wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Rest assured, classes have nothing directly to do with accounts.
> Transaction for each class can contain many accounts and those accounts can
> occur in other classes. Classes are assigned to transaction records which
> can be split for the purpose of assigning classes like they are for
> accounts. Quickbooks can only have one class per record but, as noted in
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772#c6, classes would be much
> more powerful if they were multidimensional.
> 
> The bug report has many examples, mainly around managing entity enterprise
> diversity. Consider a contrived example of an entity with an account for
> diesel and classes assigned to: farming, trucking and generator.
> * an accountant might be interested in different taxes for on-road,
> off-road, and electricity generation use
> * a manager might be interested in cost of electricity production to assess
> the viability of solar PV
> 
> The first scenario is best served with a grouped report, say profit and
> loss, with the same total as current reports. It is especially useful where
> many (but not all) of the accounts occur in one class. The second scenario
> would best use a filtered report by [electricity] generation class.
> 
> Classes are nearly always auto-assigned to transactions in Quickbooks after
> first use. The reports wouldn't need to be set up or saved (just use class
> option), and they could include all accounts for the class, not just diesel.
> 
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