Comments on: Another Quickbooks shortcoming: they need hierarchical tagging

By: sean

sean — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:17:18 +0000

Tanya, I had not heard of the ability to assign an expense to a job- that sounds like it might do what we need. I’ll look at it. Thanks!

sean

By: Tanya

Tanya — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:49:10 +0000

Have you considered assigning Job Names to your Trade Shows/ Conferences. You could then create items tied to your income/expense accounts. That way, each time you enter an item ie; meals, you would then put the job name. Then you could ruan a job expense summary.

By: sean

sean — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:03:00 +0000

Mike,
I’m admittedly no QB expert so I’m probably bastardizing the class tracking function by using it this way. Unless I misunderstand sub-accounts though, I don’t think those are the answer to my problem. Take this scenario:

The month-long road trip I just did to San Francisco consisted of various charges for meals, gas, event registration fees, car repairs, etc. I want a way to track the cost of that trip as a single initiative. Each of those trip expenses right now is assigned to a different account – some under travel, some under education, some under equipment. We went to another conference in Portland earlier this year and there was a cost associated with being there- same thing, I want to see the cost of that trip and be able at the end of the year to know what our presence at tradeshows cost us as well as dig down to a per-trip cost. Does that make sense?

Seems like accts and sub-accts won’t help and class tracking can do it but that’s all it can do (ie. it’s impossible to slice across our accounting on a different dimension like seeing revenue by application type – open source vs. proprietary, or P&L by business unit – consulting vs. hosting vs. product sales). Seems like a flattened tagging approach with ability to do parent tags would enable this and be a powerful reporting feature without introducing any extra complexity for the user (unless this is just an extreme outlier use case and 99% of the world doesn’t need the capability to report on multiple dimensions).

sean

By: Mike Rankin

Mike Rankin — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:16:18 +0000

I think maybe, you might be misunderstanding the purpose of classes in quickbooks. It’s used to give you a lightweight way to get an income statement by division. Typically, divisions would be either physical locations (the Denver office, the Boston office, etc) or lines of business (the drywall division, the hvac division, etc). By assigning revenue and expenses to the different classes, you could get an income statement for each one and a combined income statement. When you think of it this way, you can see why you could never have an expense appear in more than one class.

Other accounting systems typically accomplish this with a segmented account number. Classes (while strangely named) do this without bloating up your chart of accounts.

Speaking of your chart of accounts, that’s where you would normally get your hierarchy of expenses. For example, you have an account called “online advertising expense” with sub-accounts for pay-per-click, banner ads and direct email. You should be able to get your vendor breakdown from accounts payable with maybe a little custom report work.

I think adding tagging to an already strangely presented application would probably do more harm than good.