On 3/17/2024 12:15 PM, J. A. Harris wrote:
I have been using gnucash for almost 10 years now. I have downloaded the source code and even made some changes to it that I consider improvement. There are other changes that I think would be a good idea. If this is not the place to share such comments, I apologize.
2. Add a new Generic and INC+EXP account. No doubt this violates basic accounting rules but for an amateur like me, it is useful to have a single book in which I can separate sections like reserves, retirement, and operating items. Accounts of type Generic could have sub-accounts of any type.
Your lack of accounting and understanding of the history of double entry is confusing you. You might think of BOTH types "income" and "expense" as having a single generic type "temp equity" (not yet recorded against equity) with the ones with type "expense" just those "temp equity" accounts whose balance is normally debit and the ones with type "income" those whose balance is normally credit. Because it is usual to want reports that group all income accounts together and all expense accounts together our books tend to reflect that. But sometimes we want to group a subset of income and a subset of expenses together instead. Some of the organizations I kept books for did "events" and so might want to group all associated with an event together. Not hard, there is no magic in the names "income" and "expense". If the balance is debit, it's and expense, if credit, an income.
Thus for an event were EXPECTED to make a profit for the organization, I'd make them all of type "income". Understand? Yes, what we pay to rent the venue is an expense of the event, but we can still have an account name "venue costs" of type INCOME a child of the account that totals all income and expenses for that event. What makes the charges (the transactions for) hall rent, chair rent, cleaning, etc. expense is that they are debits to that account.
4. Give the users the ability to create new "currencies". There are a number of occasions where I have assets which have a dollar value but the accounting of that asset uses a different measure.
Those are "commodities" ----- "currency" means something is the legal tender of some sovereign power. BUT --- there might be need to account for some "local currency" which might not be exchangeable for legal tender, and commodities are expected to have some money value. Note that I am not talking about things of no value, just not a money value (conversion might not be allowed/encouraged). Thus if I were dealing with something like "Ithaca Dollars I might use gnucash to track my balance, what I received or used them for, etc. in a separate set of books.
More awkward, perhaps, assets which have value, possibly significant value, but unclear/uncertain exactly how much.
Michael D Novack _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org 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.
