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

[Michael or Penny Novack]

> If the events are fixed, such as "Memorial Day Celebration" and 
> "Independence Celebration", you could make an expense category and 
> then have sub-categories for it. I assume that you can run P&L on one 
> set  of categories. Would that work? You'd have similar 
> sub-categories. I'm pretty sure you could get a breakdown for the 
> events, but if you also want a total (for example) "postage" from each 
> category, I'm not sure how to do that, especially if you want all the 
> sub-categories summarized.  Perhaps exporting to a spreadsheet and 
> creating a pivot table? (or something along those lines?)
>
> _________________________________
> Richard Losey
> rlosey at gmail.com
> Micah 6:8

a) Accounts of type "expense" and accounts of type "income" are really 
the same type of temporary account of fundamental type equity. If you 
know the historical development of double entry bookkeeping over the 
last several hundred years you will know where they came from. They 
really differ just in the sense of their normal balance, debit for 
expenses and credit for income. We get the top level types "income" and 
"expense" only so that we do NOT have to specify them for the P&L.

b) That means we can create the subtree for an event EITHER under income 
or expense and put all children of this event there whether they are 
"really" income or expense. The "wrong" ones are simply contra in sense. 
A debit balance account of type income is a "negative" income, that is, 
an expense.

c) Assuming we consistently made all the printing and postage accounts 
the same (all expense) we can produce a report showing all of them. 
Surely you can picture and income and expense report where JUST some 
expense accounts were included. Don't have to export to a spreadsheet. 
BUT the latter is exactly what I would do in practice. You have run the 
FULL P&L (all accounts) and exported it and opened as a spreadsheet. Now 
say you want just a few accounts. COPY the spreadsheet giving it a name 
like "Printing and Postage" and then delete everything but the accounts 
for printing and postage and the spreadsheet will total those for you. 
Do the same for whatever else you need, say each event by itself, say 
all of the events (but nothing else), say the events each without it 
printing and postage (if you have ever done a 990/990EZ you'll know 
where that goes depending on whether your events make revenue or are an 
expense.

d) But WHAT is this "category: business? Why are you (still?) talking 
about categories.If you mean account, say account. We're doing standard 
double entry bookkeeping here.

Michael D Novack