I would like to be able to see inventory sales, inventory costs and Fixed Assets - Depreciation, Food on the Summary page and in Profit and Loss Statement. However, I would like to be able to click on Inventory Sales/Costs and on Fixed Assests - Depreciation and see those income/expense accounts broken up into different accounts ( not to be confused with chart of accounts).
For Example in Fixed Assets - Depreciation Expense Account when clicking on it, I would like to be able to see Fixed Assets Depreciation Mail Servers, Fixed Assets Depreciation Backup Servers, Fixed Assets Depreciation Broadband Servers. This would allow me to more accurately see what my annual costs for Mail servers etc are taking into account the depreciation costs.
With inventory costs/sales I want to break it up into laptops, computers, printers etc. However I don’t want to see inventory sales - laptops etc on the Profit and Loss statement nor on the summary page.
With Food I want to see Food on Profit and Loss and on Summary page, but when clicking on Food, see Food Vegetables, Food Dairy, Food Meat etc.
In addition it means you can budget for the expense account Food, whilst still being able to see how much you spend on each food category like Fruit and Vegetables.
Those different account have to be some form of chart of account otherwise how do you create the linkage.
e.g. - You sell a laptop, the Sales Invoice has to have COA income account of some type to end up in the P&L
To make your suggestion work within the Inventory Items you would still need to utilise the existing Custom Income & Expense account feature - say Laptop Sales & Laptop COS
But in creating those Charts of Accounts (Laptop Sales & Laptop COS) there could be an additional tick box - Report (include) this account under - and select Inventory Sales or Inventory Costs as applicable.
This tick box could also apply to other P&L accounts so that you have a Master (reporting) Account with sub-accounts on drill down. Possibly similar in operation as AR & AP, but there again possible not.
Because they are BS features and aren’t applicable to the P&L which is the topics focus.
@Brucanna, Yes I understand that there needs to be a COA income account of some type to end up in P&L. I want this income account to be inventory - sales. All I want to do is view the Inventory-Sales by breaking it up into categories. So Laptop sales would go in COA Inventory Sales and you drill down into Inventory Sales and view your Inventory Sales by whatever categories you want.
From an accounting point of view, I want the transactions to go under Inventory Sales/Cost, Fixed Asset-Depreciation and Food to use my above examples. I don’t want this to change. All I want to do is create categories or views within these expense accounts so that I can more easily see review my inventory sales/costs, what I am spending on food and more easily calculate my annual costs for Mail server etc.
Your suggestion of using Income and Expense Accounts does not work as it moves it to a COA which is not what I want - as this will add another 20 expense accounts to the P&L.
If Lubos could modify the custom income and custom expense account to make it possible to create an “account” underneath inventory sales whilst still keeping it in inventory sales COA for accounting purposes etc, then yes this would be doable. So @Tut would you upgrade this topic to an idea as I am sure that there are many people who want to only have one expense account in expenses, but be able to drill down and view by client or some other category that they desire.
@Tut as Brucanna said, Control Accounts and Special Accounts only apply to BS so not doable.
What you are asking for is subaccounts of subaccounts. For example, an inventory item is already a subaccount of Inventory on hand and the related P&L accounts. I think wading through multiple tiers of subaccounts would turn out to be difficult, as well as annoying for many. Imagine that you have 500 inventory items and decided to implement your suggested feature. Once you create your intermediate tier of subaccounts, all 500 items are now non-functional because they aren’t pointed anywhere. And if you go to the Inventory Items tab, you would see a list of subaccounts and have to drill down further (knowing in advance what category an item was in, which could be difficult in some situations, even if not in yours) before getting to the list of items itself. All that adds up to fairly major changes to the concept of operations.
Actually this is not how I would want the subaccounts of subaccounts (lol) to work. What I want is for the end user (myself) to be able to choose whether we want to break up an expense account into further categories. I don’t want the situation that you are describing where every user would have to categorise the inventory items into categories within inventory cost/sales and other expense accounts.
The way to implement this is to allow those users who want to break up an expense account into more categories to do so, whilst still allowing those users who want everything in inventory cost/sales to remain in that top tier COA.
Very much like the way Lubos implemented Custom Income and Custom Expense Accounts - you have the option to use it or not as you wish.
The problem is that custom income and expense account assignments are not being rolled up into pre-existing control accounts for display on either the balance sheet or P&L statement. If you choose to use them, they show as individual accounts. They are not subaccounts of anything. So your analogy isn’t correct.
You are asking for lowest level subaccounts (the inventory items) to be assigned to intermediate-level control accounts (your categories) for display. But these intermediate-level subaccounts still have to operate through top tier control accounts.
You have misunderstood. Yes it would create extra COA but would not create extra P&L reporting accounts. The COA sub-accounts would point to the P&L report Master account so you will only see one P&L account.
Similar to Accounts Receivable/Payable, you only have one Master account but when you point to them they contain the sub-accounts - Customers & Suppliers.
That’s exactly what I described by giving the custom income /expense account a tick box - it would put those accounts ticked underneath whatever account you choose, such as Inventory Sales for P&L reporting while still being able to drill down.
You may wish to have P&L reporting accounts Inventory Sales - Hardware and Inventory Sales - Other.
By using the tick box you can point the Inventory Item custom account to the relative P&L reporting account.
Or, if you prefer - P&L Custom Control accounts a la BS style where you can nominate an account to be Control (reporting) account and point other account to it
