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).
On Mon, 2026-06-22 at 08:43 -0400, [email protected] wrote: > To: rsbrux <[email protected]> > Cc: "[email protected] List" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [GNC] "Travel" vs. "Public Transportation" > Message-ID: > < > canyj2e3oq4knxuq_-xissbtztlthybwhg_0ocsoozc2z7bm...@mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > I think of personal travel as discretionary. You decide to go on what > I > would call vacation and what the English would call holiday. > > Generally, I think of public transportation is such things as day > trips > around town, commuting, etc. > > > Just having come back from vacation, I was bringing my accounts up to > date > yesterday, and I made a choice to move travel out from under > entertainment > to a top level expense, and create subcategories for lodging, > restaurant, > fuel, air and rail transportation, etc. This allowed me to produce a > very > nice report showing what our trip cost and why. > > On the other hand, if I took the bus downtown, I would have a > category for > that outside of travel. > > The most important question though is how do your books serve you, as > opposed to how do you serve your books. Record things that make sense > in > understanding your finances. > > Ed > > On Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 05:33 rsbrux via gnucash-user < > [email protected]> wrote: > > > I just noticed that I have two overlapping expense accounts, > > "Public > > Transportation" and "Travel". I think that both accounts were in > > the > > default GnuCash account tree, but "Public Transportation" is not a > > sub- > > account of "Travel", which is what I would have expected. > > We live in Europe and often travel by train and/or bus for both > > short > > distances and on vacation, so I'm not sure where to draw the line > > between these two. > > What arguments can be made for and against maintaining two such > > separate categories? > > _____________________________________________ _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
