[GNC] Managing multiple vehicles

[Michael Hendry]

I do the bookkeeping for my Rotary Club, and have to keep track of individual donations from members in order to claim Gift Aid on these donations.

I’m constrained in that I need to keep the donors’ names confidential in reports to the club but need to identify the donors for the claim to HMRC.

I worked around this by using the Memo field to identify the member concerned, and disabling the Memo field in routine reports to the club. When the time comes to make the Gift Aid claim (annually) I use a Transaction Report on the Income:Gift Aid account sorted with “Memo” as the Primary Key.

This gives me a subtotal table listing the members and their contributions in alphabetical order, with a total, followed by full reports of the donations from each individual.

I think this would work for Fernando, with a single Expenses:Vehicles account separated into expenses for each vehicle using the Memo field.

If you want Expenses:Vehicles:Fuel, Expenses:Vebicles:Repairs etc, just select all of the relevant accounts in the Accounts tab when setting up the Transaction Report.

If you forget to fill the Memo field of any transaction, or are inconsistent in spelling it will become obvious in the report, allocating a separate section for Tractor-1, Tractor_1 and Tractor1 etc.

Michael


> On 8 Feb 2022, at 22:16, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> 
> Play with your tags and the Transaction Report, particularly the Regex filter option.
> 
> This won't get you a single report with all vehicles, but you can isolate transactions by vehicle that way. (and maybe get something useful out of the Multi-Column Report for more than one vehicle, if not all of them)
> 
> Note, not all fields are filterable, so be sure to check that Report option's tooltip for specifics. (if Notes is an option, turn on Double-Line mode and use that field, it is well suited for it)
> 
> You may not end up with exactly the format you want, but you should be able to get the data.
> 
> Another option would be to do a Find and filter on your tags, then run an Account Report on the result. Unfortunately, there is no current facility to save Find criteria for repetition like there is for customized Reports, so you'd have to do those Finds every time for every vehicle, which might be too much work for 10 vehicles.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> On 2/3/22 1:41 PM, 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?
> 
> 
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