Gnucash: Tags/ Multi-category

Question

this is a question about if a certain feature exists of how other useres "do it":

Can i attribute different or multiple cost centers to a transaction?

Example: I went on holidays and paid a flight. I book the flight at the "mobility" expenses because all my flights go there. But in this case i would like to also have it appear on a (separate, maybe independent) list of "holiday" expenses, where other transactions related to my holidays appear, that are themselves booked at their respective expenses accounts (restaurant ("food"), museum ("recreational"),....)

Thanks for any hint!

Rots · Answer

No. There is no "official" way of tagging certain transactions with a category to view it in a "category report" later.
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772 and https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113772 for more discussions and links.

Derek_6424246 · Answer

There are multiple methods for grouping transactions, whichever you use is a matter of preference.

By source account: Many people do this implicitly, for example by placing all holiday expenses on a particular credit card.  Even if you don't have an actual account against which to bill all expenses, you can create a virtual account out of which all holiday expenses come (i.e. "Liabilities:Holiday", etc).  The cash / check / credit transactions which you make towards your holiday would then transfer into the Liabilities account to balance it back to zero.
By label: Each transaction has multiple fields which could be tagged with some identifier.  The Memos (on each split) and Notes fields (hidden by default) allow you to type any string you'd like (i.e. "Antarctic Holiday 2016") which you could then search on later.  Thus every transaction related to your trip could be brought up by finding all records with memo "Your Identifier Here", and then operations can be preformed on the search results.  I'm fairly confident that certain reports allow you to run on search results, or to limit based on the value of the memo field, for example.
By custom report configuration:  Because travel is often all-encompassing (i.e. every transaction from May 14th through June 2nd was related to the trip, with exceptions being easily identified), you can create a report which covers only that date range, then save it in the saved reports list as "Holiday Expenses 2016" or similar.  You'd need to delve into the report options to exclude certain accounts (i.e. utilities payments made during that time & etc), but once you get it squared away you never have to set it up again.  Creating future reports becomes as easy as duplicating the first holiday report and changing the dates.

There's really no right or wrong answer, which solution you implement depends on how you have implemented your account structure and whichever method gives you correct data with the least effort.

Gnucash: Tags/ Multi-category

2 Answers

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question