[GNC] Keeping tenant accounts on Gnucash - periodic 'rent owing' ?

[Adrien Monteleone]

On 3/5/22 2:20 AM, flywire wrote:
> My concern is A/R is a lot of work just to get tenant statements if it's
> not used elsewhere.
It is similar to the issue raised last month regarding
> tracking vehicles except for the regular rent due:
> https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2022-February/099785.html
> As described GnuCash has filtering on tags (eg report a single tenant) but
> no grouping (eg reports for every tenant and everything else). This is
> important to ensure all transactions are accounted for with tags.

As long as you aren't trying to track multiple 'properties' and generate 
separate P&Ls for each from a single book, there is little work 
involved. (the 'GnuCash' way here would be to use separate books for 
each property, then have a consolidated book for the few remaining 
entries, otherwise, yes, a tag system or other means would have to be 
employed)

I use the Business Features for AR with 3 clients, and AP with 7 vendors 
that issue recurring bills. (3 of which are monthly, 1 semi-annual, 3 
annual)

One could certainly handle many more, but high-volume auto-recurrence 
isn't yet built in without a bit of creative thinking. (that's another 
bug & thread concerning Scheduled Invoices)

However, there's nothing 'elsewhere' you need to do things for AR to 
work. Assuming you've got your accounts created:

1. Set up Customer (Tenant)
2. Create and post Invoice for 'rent'
3. Send 'Customer Report' statement of account
4. Process Payment, applying it to the invoice
5. repeat steps 2-4 as needed (#3 can be done at any time)

> 
> Alternative Process:
> 1. Upload bank transactions to GnuCash
> 2. In GnuCash terms, run a transaction report sorted by say date and split
> notes (assuming it contains a tag) with payments
> 3. Open report in a spreadsheet with sheets for each tenant having: Date,
> Due, Payments, Balance Owing
> 4. Append date and payments to each tenants sheet
> 5. Append date and amount due for each period
> 6. Sort by date and payments then copy balance owing formula down for
> running total
> 7. Check header and footer then print rental statement
> 
> The spreadsheet ends up as a template that is updated. It's a
> simple process but it's manual so it carries a risk of mistakes. While
> GnuCash doesn't support grouping in reports the advantage of open source is
> the whole thing could easily be automated under piecash to generate reports.

If the P&L/Income Statement had the filter options of the Transaction 
Report, life would be much easier. Then you could just filter for your 
tag, and get a custom statement for just those transactions.

I filed an enhancement request specifically for this: 
https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=798469

There is also the more generic RFE here: 
https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772

I'm not sure how difficult sorting (grouping) a Transaction Report by a 
tags would be, since tags aren't officially implemented, and can appear 
in a number of fields. Otherwise, I'd file an RFE on that too, which 
would likely satisfy many uses cases.

Regards,
Adrien