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

[Adam H. Kerman]

2:08pm -0000 06/22/26 Patrick James via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash....:

>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.

What cost? There is a minimal time cost involved in thinking about how to 
categorize expenses, but once I've created the account, it's just a matter 
of choosing that account consistently when I enter the expenditure. If I 
enter an expentiture, I have to choose an expense account on the debit side 
of the ledger anyway.