I have a client -- using QBO -- that holds conventions. Income & expenses start in one year and complete the next.
For accounting purposes, I was thinking about their conventions like a building project, starting at a time and incurring income & expenses until the project is complete. Without a specific customer.
I need to track each annual convention P&L separately and be able to compare from year to year and compare income streams for each convention to the corresponding cost center. I also need percentage comparatives to income vs costs (if possible). The client was even thinking about changing their FYE to align with the convention period. I said this is not necessary because nearly every good accounting software product can track projects over different, non-annual periods.
Each convention is not tied to a customer, but I thought about using 'Projects' because I believe this will produce the comparative financials that they want. However, as these are conventions, there is no specific customer. I could set up a Dummy Customer for each annual convention...??? Say, "Customer 2019", "Customer 2020", etc. I don't know if a Dummy Customer will work as the client actually has hundreds of subscribers for each convention; can I have a project with income coming in from different "invoicing" customers?
Also, thinking about the future, would I be able to possibly do sub-projects, if necessary? Say two or three conventions that start accruing income & expenses at different times, but are all held in the same year (in case they decide to expand their business).
I thought about assigning classes, but I don't want 'Class' assignments, long passed, to keep showing up in financials with 'zero' in the columns. I am also not sure that 'Class' will give us the comparative financials requested.
I don't know if 'Categories' will work for this type of project accounting, but I may be wrong...
Does anyone else have experience with this type of business? If not, any brainstorming is greatly appreciated.
Deb
