[GNC] Account tree

[Tom Route36]

Hi Clint,

I was looking back thru this email chain; and I noticed that earlier you 
were saying that what you were really hoping for was that GnuCash had 
the ability to do tagging.  Well, it kinda does -- although not 
officially, and not in a very straightforward manner. I personally don't 
have a need to do this on a regular basis; but if you're looking for a 
way to tag transactions with some sort of free-form tag names, this 
might work for you.

Create a new asset account, and name it Tags.  When you want to tag a 
transaction, say a meeting room that was paid for with a credit card, 
add a split entry to that transaction.  The split you add will be a 
zero-amount; but what it does is it gives you a dedicated Memo field.  
In that Memo field for the Tags account, you can now type in your tag -- 
e.g., #July-Meeting.  If you add a similar split entry for every 
transaction related to the July Meeting, you can then run a Transaction 
Report that only includes the Tags account, and that you can filter for 
only those transactions that include the tag #July-Meeting.

It's not a very elegant solution; but it might help get you that tagging 
feature that GnuCash lacks.  Hope this helps a little.

Tom



On 07/25/2026 10:36 AM, Clint Chaplin wrote:
> Why?  tl;dr: to implement the missing ability to have "job
> costing"/"tagging".
>
> Longer explanation: I keep the books for a group that has three meetings a
> year, in March, July, and November.  Everything is focused on those three
> meetings, and very little happens (financially) outside of those meetings.
> At one point we had the ability to keep finances on a system that
> implemented tagging, and it was glorious!  Unfortunately, the parent
> organization changed finance software several times since then, and none of
> the replacements have tagging.
>
> Each meeting has income (meetings fees, primarily), and expenses (F&B, AV,
> meeting rooms, etc).   I'm keeping the finances in a rather elaborate
> spreadsheet that goes back to 2011 that we've sorta agreed will be our
> source of truth, but we want to switch to something more open and portable.
>
> I was hoping that with Gnucash I could use an account tree that started
> with the year, then the meeting, then the associated income and expenses,
> to sorta implement tagging.  But it is not to be.  Beancount is an option
> that has been suggested that actually has tagging, but I have other issues
> with its philosophy.
>
>