See the recent thread about 'tracking expenses for trips', the same
advice applies to your use case. (and parts of that it seems were
already offered in this thread)
I'd keep my Tree clean, keep my Descriptions clean (I use them as
payee/payor like the old paper checkbook register days), and put in my
own 'tags' in the Notes or Memo fields. Then I'd run 2 Transaction
Reports filtering on my desired tags, one for related revenue, the other
for expenses, exporting both to a file, importing into a spreadsheet,
and making a pretty P&L for that 'Job' as desired.
That might sound like lots of work for a report, but I'll hazard it is
less than trying to maintain a custom and cluttered Tree.
As for 'open and portable' you could maintain that external spreadsheet
in an open format which is usable in either LibreOffice and related or
Google Sheets. Optionally, just print a final pretty copy to PDF. Either
can be made available with the GnuCash data file, and even stored in the
same directory if you like.
Regards,
Adrien
p.s. - I have vague recollection someone built a tagging system or
reporting via the python bindings, but I don't recall who or what the
thread name. Searching the archives should turn up that discussion. It
should be in the last 3 years or so, but hey, time flies...
On 7/25/26 11:36 AM, Clint Chaplin wrote:
Why? tl;dr: to implement the missing ability to have "job
costing"/"tagging".
Longer explanation: I keep the books for a group that has three meetings a
year, in March, July, and November. Everything is focused on those three
meetings, and very little happens (financially) outside of those meetings.
At one point we had the ability to keep finances on a system that
implemented tagging, and it was glorious! Unfortunately, the parent
organization changed finance software several times since then, and none of
the replacements have tagging.
Each meeting has income (meetings fees, primarily), and expenses (F&B, AV,
meeting rooms, etc). I'm keeping the finances in a rather elaborate
spreadsheet that goes back to 2011 that we've sorta agreed will be our
source of truth, but we want to switch to something more open and portable.
I was hoping that with Gnucash I could use an account tree that started
with the year, then the meeting, then the associated income and expenses,
to sorta implement tagging. But it is not to be. Beancount is an option
that has been suggested that actually has tagging, but I have other issues
with its philosophy.
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