[GNC] Accounting for Income and Expenses from Multiple Business Locations

[Jim DeLaHunt]

Hello, Gary, and welcome to GnuCash!

On 2024-12-07 12:45, Gary Kulp wrote:
> I'd be appreciative if someone could illustrate how to account for income and expenses from multiple business locations....

Firstly, let me acquaint you with a clarifying question that appears 
frequently on the gnucash-user list. Are you asking for accounting 
advice, or how to implement an accounting approach using GnuCash?

For accounting advice, the answer depends on what information you are 
trying to capture, what the rules are about taxes and reporting in your 
jurisdiction, and the accumulated wisdom of accounting experts; and how 
all the above applies to your specific situation. An internet-wide email 
list has a hard time doing justice to that. You will get better 
accounting advice from an expert who can ask about your situation and 
who knows your jurisdiction, than you will from GnuCash user.

Secondly, one obvious accounting approach is "tags": have a chart of 
accounts like you give in your example, with income breakdowns and 
expense breakdowns (called "accounts" in GnuCash), and then apply a 
"tag" to each transaction which indicates the city to which that 
transaction applies.  This gives you a two-dimensional information 
structure: you can report by income or expense account to get answers 
for all cities, or filter by tag to get results for a single city.

GnuCash has no direct support for tags on transactions.

You can find out about past discussions on the subject in various places:

  * "[GNC] The equivalent for Quicken Tag" thread, from gnucash-user
    list archives, April 2024,
    <https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2024-April/111727.html>
  * "Gnucash: Tags/ Multi-category" Q&A from Personal Finance
    StackExchange<https://money.stackexchange.com/q/91029/7867> (Note: I
    have not reviewed these answers, they just looked relevant in a web
    search)
  * "Custom Reports for GnuCash 5.x", code for GnuCash reports which
    approximate Tags behaviour
    <https://github.com/dawansv/gnucash-custom-reports> (Note: I have
    not used or even reviewed these reports, so I can't vouch for them
    as useful or not)

Thirdly, without approximating tags, the obvious way to implement 
accounting for different salons in different cities, or different 
projects in general, is to layer the cities into the income and expense 
breakdowns. You might end up with an account structure like:



Income
      Haircuts
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle

      Hair Coloring
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle

      Product Sales
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle


Expenses
      Rent
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle

      Utilities
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle

      Cost of Goods Sold
           Shampoo
              Dallas
              Los Angeles
              New York
              San Francisco
              Seattle

           Scissor Sharpening
              Dallas
              Los Angeles
              New York
              San Francisco
              Seattle

           Hair Coloring Product
              Dallas
              Los Angeles
              New York
              San Francisco
              Seattle

      Sub-contractor Wages
          Dallas
          Los Angeles
          New York
          San Francisco
          Seattle

Then you can define a GnuCash custom report which selects just the 
accounts relevant to one location, to get the breakdown of activity for 
that location; and another report which selects the income and expense 
breakdown parent accounts, to get activity for all locations.

Information about defining custom reports is in the GnuCash Manual and 
in the Tutorial and Concepts Guide. I recommend you giving those a read.

Best regards,
      —Jim DeLaHunt