Gnucash - Report cash flow on a per-asset basis

Question

I'm not sure I'm using the correct terminology but I have a number of "assets" which are sub-accounts of a checking account: Checking account - Designated funds 1 - Designated funds 2 ...

What I would like to do is create a report that has the "income" and "expenses" of each account (per account similar to the Account Balances report), something like

1/1/2018 to 12/31/2018
Account               Income     Expense    Balance
Designated funds 1    100        50         150
Designated funds 2    21         5          16

In this example, Designated funds already had a balance of 100 before the start of the year. Ideally the ending balance would be there but I can get that from the Account Balances report. And of course each of these categories could have a starting balance.

The key part is the income/expense per account. The only way I know how to do that currently is through the cash flow and with that I have to run the report and look at the totals for each individual account...not ideal.

Is there a built-in way to do what I want to? Am I thinking about this wrong or have my account structure wrong?

Answer 1

Your question appears to be asking about the features available in a particular accounting software package. You'd have to say what software you are using for anyone to be able to answer you.

In general: If you have these designated funds, each would be an Asset account. Then any transactions would debit this account and credit some income account or credit this account and debit an expense account. (Or something more complicated, if more accounts are involved.) You shouldn't need to tie the expense and income accounts to the designated funds, because the individual transactions should be the connection.

Then at the end of the year run a ledger for each of the designated funds. That should show all transactions and the associated accounts. I'd guess it's unlikely that your accounting software would have a feature to total income and separately total expenses. At least, I don't recall seeing such a feature in any accounting software I ever used, but then, I was never looking for such a feature. But you could do this manually or copy the data into a spreadsheet.