Entering the monthly bills

[Derrick Hudson]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 01:00:03PM -0600, Jeff Smith wrote:
| Having a fairly good handle now on where the money WENT, I'm starting to 
| move to a forward-looking "where the money IS GOING". So instead of just 
| recording bills as they get paid, I'll be entering them when they arrive 
| in the mail.
| 
| The question is, what's the best way to do this? I see three alternatives.
| 
| 1) Enter payments, with future dates on or before the actual bill's due 
| date) as though I've paid them in the future.
| 
| 2) Create a liability account (or accounts) and juggle "debt" around 
| between those liability accounts and the associated expense accounts.

For credit cards I use option #2.  I enter the items when I get home
with the receipt (or in the next couple days).  This shows me how much
the bill will be when it arrives.

However the phone I just record it when I get the bill and write a
check.  For this one the transaction affects my checking account and
the expense account for the phone.  (actually now I pay the phone with
my credit card for the cashback bonus, but I pay off the credit card
at the end of the month)  When I had utility bills in my name I did
the same thing for them.

I use a different technique for some other monthly payments.  Not too
long ago (maybe 6 months) I discovered Scheduled Transactions.  Now I
have a scheduled transaction for each loan payment and for the
charitable contributions I make each month.  This provides the
reminder and fills in almost all of the transaction details for me.
This doesn't, however, show you future balances in your account and
inform you that you will need to have the money for later when the
bill does arrive.

I have at times toyed with entering transactions in the future to have
them show future projections in the Net Worth report.  This is
somewhat tedious.  This sort of thing really falls under "budgeting",
which gnucash doesn't implement yet.  (I did find some historic
discussions about it in list archives)

| 3) Set up an actual vendor and bill system using the business tools.

I don't have enough of an accounting background to know how this
works.


I think the best you can do is find examples of techniques, understand
how they work, and then decide if the process will work for you and
the results show you the information you need.

-D

-- 
Failure is not an option.  It is bundled with the software.
 
www: http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/            jabber: dman at dman13.dyndns.org
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