[GNC] "Travel" vs. "Public Transportation"

[Patrick James]

There are plenty of good analysis of financial data, and there could be good reasons to have separate accounts for various expenses, different divisions of expenses. There are ways to analyze by description ("payee").

With that out of the way, it has been my personal observation that one can generally compute the public transportation costs without any financial records.

It is almost always the case that public transportation is cheaper in terms of financial cost. Public transportation is generally more expensive in terms of time (idealize automobile travel time and parking location, if necessary). There may be some other public transportation issues, but lower financial cost and higher time cost are generally observed. Moving from the daily rate to a monthly/annual pass, the computation about the "savings" of a pass can generally be computed without any financial records. Just answer the question, "How many days do I expect to ride next month/year?"

What I'm suggesting is that it is often the case that maintaining extra data in the financial records is very often not necessary, the benefit is not worth the cost.


> On 06/22/2026 7:08 AM PDT rsbrux via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> Thanks for the very sensible advice. We don't really need to know our
> travel expenses in that much detail, and since we are retired, almost
> all of our travel is discretionary (with the possible exception of
> medical appointmemts ;-).
> The only use I can think of for a separate account would be to
> calculate which kind of annual pass (e.g. reduced fare) for public
> transportation might be most economical. However, we could probably
> figure that out by using a report filtered by payee (assuming there is
> such a thing).
>