[GNC] Business Income Statement: manipulating Cost of Goods sold

[Eric Chapman]

(Note 1: I hope the mailing list presents this with fixed-width 
characters. If it does not, but sample below of a tax form will not 
appear as I intended it to.)

(Note 2: The three attached screenshots might help you understand my 
question. I hope they are small enough to come through.)

In GnuCash 5.4 I have a Chart of Accounts / Account Tree that reflects 
Schedule F of Form 1040 for reporting of farm business.

I use the business feature "Accounts Payable."

Here is how part of it looks:

1a Sales of purchased livestock and other resale 
items                            $xxxx.xx <-- my sales of resale items 
account
1b Cost or other basis or purchased livestock or other items reported on 
line 1a    xxx.xx <-- I have 3 Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) accounts that 
are to be here (should be income account with debit balance [negative])
1c Subtract line 1b from line 1a $xxxx.xx

My problem:

In the Chart of Accounts / Account Tree I set up the COGS accounts as 
"income" accounts. As such, in v. 5.4 the COGS accounts were not on the 
drop down list of "expenses" to debit when recording purchases. So I 
changed the tick mark for them and called them expenses. They worked fine.

But now when I print a report, the COGS accounts are listed down in the 
expense section of the Income Statement, not up under "1a" as they 
should be (and as they are "parented" an "begotten" in the Chart of 
Accounts / Account Tree).

These are the workarounds I see:

(1) Change the 3 COGS accounts back to having the "Expense" attribute 
before printing reports.

(2) Debit all COGS items into inventory accounts and later make journal 
entries (transactions) from that inventory account to the COGS accounts. 
I realize this is normal (maybe desirable, but since I'm using all of 
those COGS items immediately, I thought I'd save time and not use 
inventory accounts.

What I'd like:

The ability for the accounts called "Expenses" but used for COGS to be 
debitable when entering "Bills" (invoices issued to me by vendors).

Are there better ways to do what I want to do, or an option to tweak 
GnuCash so that I can debit those accounts as I want to?

Advice, anyone?

Thank you very much!

-- 
Eric Chapman
GnuCash 5.4 on MacOS 14.1 Sonoma running on an Apple M3 Max computer.
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