tracking mileage in anMoney

[Jordan Lee Wagner]

In 2012, the AnMoney developer responded favorably and made it a pinned post.  

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---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Jordan Lee Wagner <jordanl...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 14, 2012, 1:40 PM
Subject: [anMoney Forum] tracking mileage in anMoney
To: <anmone...@googlegroups.com>

I am using anMoney to capture everything needed for tax preparation, so I've been trying to jury-rig a way to track mileage.  I'd like a sanity check on what I've done:

1.
First I selected a country whose currency I never expect to use.  (In my case it was United Arab Emirates; your choice might differ.) 

2.
Then I edited that currency's information so that its name is now "miles" and its symbol is "mi."

3.
I then created an account called "mileage" and selected "miles" as its currency. 

4.
anMoney wouldn't let me save an exchange rate of 0, so I set the exchange rate for "miles"  to anMoney's minimum, which currently appears to be .000001
(This means that if I log one million miles in my car, the dollar value of the mileage account would still be only $1.)

5.
I then created a category called "mileage" and subcategories for each of the different kinds of mileage that I have:
mileage:charity (for schedule A)
mileage:rentals (for schedule E)
mileage:business (for schedule C)
mileage:employee (for form 2106)
etc.
And all these transactions get posted only in the "mileage" account.

6.
I had originally thought to track mileage in a separate book from the money book, so as not to distort even one currency of the money book, nor risk being a few cents off (the exchange "value" of the miles) in a net worth report. 

But that wouldn't work.  I need all the classifications and projects of the money book to be available to the mileage category.  (If new projects are added to the money book the two books could get out of sync.) 

For example:  Several copies (or columns) of schedule E must be filed for different rental properties.  Just as expense transactions in the RentalProperty:Utilities category require classification to associate the expense with a particular property (i.e., different copies of schedule E) so too must transactions in the mileage:rentals category. 



So...that's it!  It seems to work well. 
But it's such an abuse of the software's intended functions that I'm posting here to ask if there's a better way to track mileage, or if there are impending problems with this approach that I haven't foreseen. 

Thanks for your attention.

--- Jordan

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