Hi Clint,
I was looking back thru this email chain; and I noticed that earlier you
were saying that what you were really hoping for was that GnuCash had
the ability to do tagging. Well, it kinda does -- although not
officially, and not in a very straightforward manner. I personally don't
have a need to do this on a regular basis; but if you're looking for a
way to tag transactions with some sort of free-form tag names, this
might work for you.
Create a new asset account, and name it Tags. When you want to tag a
transaction, say a meeting room that was paid for with a credit card,
add a split entry to that transaction. The split you add will be a
zero-amount; but what it does is it gives you a dedicated Memo field.
In that Memo field for the Tags account, you can now type in your tag --
e.g., #July-Meeting. If you add a similar split entry for every
transaction related to the July Meeting, you can then run a Transaction
Report that only includes the Tags account, and that you can filter for
only those transactions that include the tag #July-Meeting.
It's not a very elegant solution; but it might help get you that tagging
feature that GnuCash lacks. Hope this helps a little.
Tom
On 07/25/2026 10:36 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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