[GNC] What account name do you use to record the apartment/house expenses related to the building?

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 4/14/2024 8:45 PM, Oleander via gnucash-user wrote:
> Hello,
> is "Housing" a proper account name if I want to include only my apartment expenses like Rent/Mortgage and Repairs&Maintenance? I'd like to record my Utilities expenses separately within another account so that my "Housing" account adds up only the expenses related to the building.
>
> If not, what would you use?
>
> Thanks,

a) The name you choose to give an account is whatever is meaningful to 
YOU. Just avoid any of the (few) reserved account names (like "asset", 
"expense", etc.)

b) You can either have "utilities" totally elsewhere OR you can consider 
those expense intimately related to housing and have that account a 
CHILD of "housing". Your CoA (chart of accounts) is logically of 
structure type TREE where accounts can be children of an account that is 
their parent. So you could have "rent" and "utilities" as children of 
"housing". That would allow you to see the separate totals of 
"utilities" and "rent" as well as the total for "housing" (I am 
referring to reports)

c) But say you were thinking of entering OTHER sorts of utility expenses 
under "utilities", say you bill for phone service << we used to think of 
a phone associated with a place but now many of us carry them in our 
pockets. You could have "utilities"  separate..

d) What you can;t do is have it both ways. Traditional double entry 
bookkeeping allows only one tree structure for the CoA. To get it 
different in different reports you would have to BOTH set up the CoA 
correctly AND select just certain accounts for the report.

Michael D Novack