Assigning transactions to projects in Ledger?

Question

I find I really want to add an additional, orthogonal layer to the account hierarchy. Quicken and Quickbooks lets you do this, but I'm not sure what the best way is in Ledger. I wish I could do something like this: 2018-08-28 Home Depot Expenses:Raw Materials/Client A:Phase 1 $42.87 Expenses:Raw Materials/Client B:Phase 2 $37.50 Liabilities:Credit Card:Chase 2018-08-28 Western Tool & Supply Expenses:Tooling/Client A $53.01 Liabilities:Credit Card:Chase And you could constrain queries like this (perhaps with a command line option to distinguish projects and accounts with the same name):  $ ledger "Client A"   $ 95.88 Expenses   $ 42.87 Raw Materials   $ 53.01 Tooling  -----------  $ ledger "Client B"   $ 37.50 Expenses:Raw Materials  -----------   $ 37.50 Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

As far as my recollection goes, there are two customizable fields to the entry form in Quickbooks: 1) class and 2) location/project. The other four fields are your standard 1) vendor, 2) GL account, and 3) Client 4) date. Hence, in total, there are six separate filters for running modified reports.

You may use the class or project field for identifying each transaction as a phase. The class field should be used if you expect that separate line items will apply to a different phase as the project field applies to the whole transaction.

I personally used the project field in cases where I wanted the transaction to be reflected on the balance sheet report. If this is the case for your purposes, the phases will appear on the balance sheet as a capitalized amount. But this doesn’t seem to be the case in your example.