tracking "debt" to charity, with cost accounting

[Linas Vepstas]

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On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:53:16PM -0000, Seth Gordon was heard to remark:
> My wife and I want to make sure that 10% of our (income minus
> student-loan payments) goes to charity.
>=20
> The most logical way to do this is by creating a "charity payable"
> account; I could transfer 10% of every paycheck from my checking
> account to C/P, split the source of every student-loan payment 90:10
> between checking and C/P, and make all charitable donations directly
> out of C/P.  However, if I do it that way, then GnuCash will not have
> an accurate running balance for the checking account, and checks
> written to charitable organizations will show up in C/P, but not in
> the checking account.
>=20
> What are better ways to handle this?

Tow remarks:
1) there is no easy way to automate the 10% part.  You'll need to do
   this by hand.

2) The correct way to do this is as follows:  100% of every paycheck
   goes to the bank acct. 100% of each loan payment as well.

   You create an asset (type bank, for example) account called 'c/p',=20
   and a separate expense account (type expense) called 'cp expense'.

   You transfer funds from 'c/p' to 'cp expense'.  This is where you
   manually compute the 10%.  Note that this also means you have twice
   as much work to do: transer paycheck to bank, and transfer cp to sp exp.

   Eevery now and then, when you want to actually pay some charity, you
   transfer from the bank to 'c/p'. =20

This will keep your bank balances correct, and will also have that
nagging balance in c/p that says 'time to cut a check to some charity'.

-- linas


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