Hello, Gary, and welcome to GnuCash!
On 2024-12-07 12:45, Gary Kulp wrote:
I'd be appreciative if someone could illustrate how to account for income and
expenses from multiple business locations....
Firstly, let me acquaint you with a clarifying question that appears
frequently on the gnucash-user list. Are you asking for accounting
advice, or how to implement an accounting approach using GnuCash?
For accounting advice, the answer depends on what information you are
trying to capture, what the rules are about taxes and reporting in your
jurisdiction, and the accumulated wisdom of accounting experts; and how
all the above applies to your specific situation. An internet-wide email
list has a hard time doing justice to that. You will get better
accounting advice from an expert who can ask about your situation and
who knows your jurisdiction, than you will from GnuCash user.
Secondly, one obvious accounting approach is "tags": have a chart of
accounts like you give in your example, with income breakdowns and
expense breakdowns (called "accounts" in GnuCash), and then apply a
"tag" to each transaction which indicates the city to which that
transaction applies. This gives you a two-dimensional information
structure: you can report by income or expense account to get answers
for all cities, or filter by tag to get results for a single city.
GnuCash has no direct support for tags on transactions.
You can find out about past discussions on the subject in various places:
* "[GNC] The equivalent for Quicken Tag" thread, from gnucash-user
list archives, April 2024,
<https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2024-April/111727.html>
* "Gnucash: Tags/ Multi-category" Q&A from Personal Finance
StackExchange<https://money.stackexchange.com/q/91029/7867> (Note: I
have not reviewed these answers, they just looked relevant in a web
search)
* "Custom Reports for GnuCash 5.x", code for GnuCash reports which
approximate Tags behaviour
<https://github.com/dawansv/gnucash-custom-reports> (Note: I have
not used or even reviewed these reports, so I can't vouch for them
as useful or not)
Thirdly, without approximating tags, the obvious way to implement
accounting for different salons in different cities, or different
projects in general, is to layer the cities into the income and expense
breakdowns. You might end up with an account structure like:
Income
Haircuts
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Hair Coloring
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Product Sales
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Expenses
Rent
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Utilities
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Cost of Goods Sold
Shampoo
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Scissor Sharpening
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Hair Coloring Product
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Sub-contractor Wages
Dallas
Los Angeles
New York
San Francisco
Seattle
Then you can define a GnuCash custom report which selects just the
accounts relevant to one location, to get the breakdown of activity for
that location; and another report which selects the income and expense
breakdown parent accounts, to get activity for all locations.
Information about defining custom reports is in the GnuCash Manual and
in the Tutorial and Concepts Guide. I recommend you giving those a read.
Best regards,
—Jim DeLaHunt
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