Our Condo Assn has 3 Bldgs and we'd like to be able to track Inc and Exp for each building separately and rolled up. What's the best way to set up the Chart of Accounts?

Hello @jdougpelton ,

My suggestion would be to leave your COA intact and use Classes for tracking each building.  This way your COA doesn't get cluttered up with a lot of extra accounts.  You can continue posting to the same accounts, but enter a Class, i.e. Bldg 1, Bldg 2, Bldg 3, etc.

Classes are a very effective way of getting reporting for different departments, or in this case, buildings.  Data entry would have to be done accurately to get accurate reporting, meaning that all income and  expense entries for the buildings  would need to have the Class field populated.

Once all your income and expenses have been entered with classes specified on all entries, you can run a Profit and Loss by Class report.  This will break your P & L out into the different buildings.  Anything not posted to a specific class will be under a column entitled Not Specified.

If you have not yet turned on Class Tracking, you can do so by going to the Gear icon in the top right of your window.  Settings-->Company Settings-->Company-->Categories.  If Track Classes is turned Off, click on the edit pencil to turn it on.  It should be noted here that you can also track locations.  I believe it is meant to track income and expenses of different store locations of the same company, but there's no reason why you couldn't use it in the same manner as you would use Classes.

The only reason you might want to use Classes rather than Locations is if you have one vendor invoice, for example, but you want to split the expense between the three buildings; if so, you could enter three different lines on the invoice to split the transaction to the different classes/buildings.  With Location, the entire transaction will be recorded to that location.  You will just have to try to determine which one will work better for you.

Good luck!

I have a similar situation.  I have several projects that I want to be able to track income and expenses for.  I was hoping to use the projects function, but it only allows for one customer per project.  If I assign each project as a class, does the profit/loss statement by class break it out by account category.  Will it present the same as the whole company profit/loss statement, just breaking out the class portion in the report?  Can you assign subclasses?

I was looking at using tags, but I don't want a report with all the transactions.  I'd like it broken out by chart of accounts categories per project.

Hi there rath1,

It's vital that all your transactions be entered properly in your books so that your accounts can be correctly balanced. Class tracking is a great feature able to help you separate some transactions into distinct groups to help filter reporting. I can provide some information about the Profit and loss by the class report.

This report by default will be similar to the original Profit and loss report, where each row is a different account in your chart of accounts. In the Profit and loss by class, every single class is represented in a column. By default, each class is shown, but you can filter it to show only a specific class or a group of classes by clicking on Customize, then going into the filters section. In the Class dropdown, you can choose the selection of classes wanted.

As for classes themselves, there isn't a way to add a subclass to an existing class, but you can use the report filter to only show the classes wanted in the report.

if you have any other questions, feel free to reach out here.