Gal - Well-stated question, except you omit description of the problem in language of accounting as taught to, learned by, and understood by accountants of the classical type, i.e. CPA's, students and graduates of business programs, accounting researchers and educators. Which is to describe the feature lacking as JOB COSTING. I.e. to allow a company or nonprofit the ability to use identifier codes to indicate specific JOBS, e.g. for a home renovation business to identify both revenues and expenses associated with a given construction project, or for a nonprofit to identify different programs, or for a catering firm to identify different gigs. And to support budgeting and profitability reporting in summary and in detail, BY JOB. JOB COSTING is included in the second of two intro courses in accounting that are required for all undergraduate business majors (whether Marketing or Entrepreneurship or Finance or whatever is their specific major) in the U.S., for example.
The statement of the problem in terms of adding "categories" or "tagging" reflects what I think may be characterized as "the computer programming world" (I'd welcome better characterization) and to some extent modern accounting software world of Quickbooks (and probably some other accounting software) which allow for "classes" in addition to "jobs". Classes as given in Quickbooks are useful, e.g. for a nonprofit to distinguish between "Program services" vs. "Administrative" vs. "Fundraising" for a U.S. nonprofit's required reporting on IRS form 990, and probably have other purposes, but are not part of the general corpus of what's covered in accounting education, while JOB COSTING is. (Quicken's "categories" were equivalent to regular _accounts_; Quicken did not support job costing.) In your application for a person's accounting, "Vacations" or more specific "Vacation-Portugal 2019", "Vacation-Thailand 2020" could be designated as "jobs", probably with job numbers. In Quickbooks' "Customer:Job" terminology, you'd use "Vacation" as a "customer" and then "Portugal 2019" and "Thailand 2020" as "jobs". For nonprofits, the "Customer" would be one grant source, and "Jobs" would be the 2019 grant, the 2020 grant, etc. and it can be very important / essential for a nonprofit to provide exact tracking of their expenditures related to one of these specific grants or another. The "Customer:Job" terminology for the fields in Quickbooks apply most naturally for businesses which have multiple contracts or projects over the years for major customers. About your first suggested workaround strategy of using "#code" tags within a memo field, I suppose it could sort of work, _if_ it is possible to design custom Income Statement reports, Balance Sheet reports, etc. in GnuCash specific to each defined tag. About your second suggested workaround, expanding the chart of accounts for an entity, that has been repeatedly recommended by GnuCash user-list commentors, say when a catering company owner asks "can I use gnucash" but is not helpful. A firm wants reporting by type of expenditure account (e.g. food & beverage purchases, staffing costs, equipt rental, etc.) AND it wants reporting by JOB. I can't imagine recommending GnuCash for any person or firm or nonprofit which needs, or would seriously benefit from, JOB COSTING (and it's getting hard for me to imagine any entities which would not benefit from that). So for myself and for my nonprofit and forprofit clients, I use Quickbooks' versions (e.g. Desktop Pro) which include JOB COSTING. The feature of JOB COSTING is among my top 5 recommendations/requests for what GnuCash should add. So short answer: I don't see either workaround working. sincerely, Don Cram Say I spend 100€ at a restaurant during a vacation in Italy. The obvious transaction is a 100€ credit to checking account and 100€ debit to Expenses:Eating out But I would also like to be able to track the vacation expenses, so I have to classify all transactions took place during the vacation, for example with a #italy2020 tag. Summarizing all discussions I've read, there are two common workarounds, or ways to manually implement classification in gnucash: 1. By adding the tag #italy2020 to the description, note or memo field of the transaction. The transaction report can then filter transactions by the tag string. 2. By creating an additional account, called italy2020, and change the transaction splits in the following way: Cr. Assets:Checking 100€ Dr. Tags:italy2020 100€ -- Cr. Tags:italy2020 100€ Dr. Expenses:Eating out 100€ On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 3:14 PM David Cousens <davidcous...@bigpond.com> wrote: > Will, > > The confusion often arises because your bank regards a savings/checking > account in your name as a liability in their books while in your own books > it is an asset. Conversely your credit card is an asset in the bank's books > and a liability in yours > > See > > https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_accts.html#:~:text=The%20accounting%20equation%20that%20links,rearranged%20Assets%20%2D%20Liabilities%20%3D%20Equity > . > > Wikipedia also has a few good articles dealing with the Accounting equation > and Debits and Credits to accounts. > > Summary Accounting equation > Assets = Liabilities +Equity + Income - Expenses > > If you rearrange it as > Assets +Expenses = Liabilities +Equity +Income > then > Increases to account balances of accounts of the type on the LHS are Debits > and decreases are Credits > and conversely > Increase to account balances for accounts on the RHS are Credits and > decreases are Debits. > > David > > > > ----- > David Cousens > -- > Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html > _______________________________________________ > gnucash-user mailing list > gnucash-user@gnucash.org > To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user > If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see > https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. > ----- > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. > _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. 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