[GNC] Ideas and recommendations for community project

[gibelium at gmx.net]

Thanks for your responses Jim and Michael,
I believe I have a good understanding of assets, liabilities, income and
expenses. Not as deep an understanding as an accountant, of course, but
my work in the IT industry for large discount retailers and my personal
investments, have fortunately given me a basic understanding of these
things. Nonetheless, I will be happy to work through the book, or parts
of it, "Principles of Acounting". It certainly helps me along the way to
gain a deeper understanding.
Also, I am aware that a community project is on the one hand a rather
special construct for accounting and on the other hand most of the cash
flows are certainly mapped in the same way as it would be the case in a
company.
Currently I would like to map the money flows internally to create some
transparency regarding the finances for the members. The step of mapping
the accounting for the tax office can then be added in the future.

Obviously my basic question was latently wrongly formulated. Of course,
first of all I would like to develop an idea with which kind of accounts
I can map the money flows in a meaningful way. I thought that this
mailing list would be a good possibility to collect ideas and
recommendations to create a concept out of it. The concrete mapping in
gnuCash is definitely the second step.

Maybe a good idea is to clarify my questions in a forum for finance and
accountants. If anyone has recommendations for one, they are very welcome.

Many thanks and best regards,
Sebastian


On 31.07.23 15:09, Michael or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 7/31/2023 1:36 AM, Jim DeLaHunt wrote:
>> Hello, Sebastian:
>>
>> Welcome to GnuCash! I hope it works well for you.
>>
>> On 2023-07-30 22:28, gibelium at gmx.net wrote:
>>> I have recently started using gnuCash and am trying to figure out if I
>>> can use gnuCash in a meaningful way to map the cash flows in a
>>> community
>>> project. I think I understand the basic concepts through the tutorial
>>> and with a test project, but am still looking for ideas and
>>> recommendations for some specific circumstances. …[details elided]…
>>
>> How about this as a first thought: do you understand the accounting
>> aspect of your questions, separate from how to use GnuCash to perform
>> the accounting?  Do you have an idea of which of these things you
>> want to track are assets, liabilities, income, or expenses?  Do you
>> have an idea of how you would track these if doing bookkeeping on
>> paper sheets with lots of columns?
>>
>> If you do not, then you will probably be greatly helped by learning
>> some basic accounting. For instance, you could read this textbook,
>> /Principles of Accounting/, Vol 1
>> <https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-financial-accounting>,
>> which is free to read online. Once you understand the accounting
>> aspect of these things you want to track, it will be easier to
>> understand how to use GnuCash.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>     —Jim DeLaHunt
>
> ABSOLUTELY --- your first problem is not "how do I do this using
> gnucash?" but "how would I do this were it in the old days, pen and
> ink on paper?" In other words, what accounts do I need, etc. I most
> strongly suggest that you get some texts on accounting, looking for
> those that cover the sort of entity you are trying to keep the books
> for as it is NOT the most common sort of entity. You might find
> guidance by looking up what sort of entity you would be by the tax
> codes << I am going to guess one of the "pass through" types, but
> there are more than one of these sorts >>
>
> Michael D Novack
>
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