tracking "debt" to charity, with cost accounting

[Dale Alspach]

Another possibility which has some disadvantages but may work for you is
to create a subaccount of the bank account called charity. Each time you
deposit income transfer 10% into the charity subaccount.  The running
balance in the main account will not be the true amount in your account
but will instead give you available funds for expenses. (The total shown
by gnucash for the bank account on the main listing and on reports will
be the total of the bank accounts and be the actual balance.) When
you want to pay something to a charity, transfer the amount from the
charity subaccount to the main bank account and write the check off the
main account. If you make a loan payment, you will also need to make a
transfer of 10% from the subaccount.

There are some problems with this approach.  One is the running balance
problem noted above. Reconciling is also a little funny.

If you check off all transfers
Gnucash reconcile will not work quite right because it does not handle
subaccounts. The account will be balanced when the error is exactly the
amount in the subaccount. You will have to use the override "finish" in
the reconcile window menu. You will also have a number of transactions
in gnucash which will not correspond to actual transactions for the
bank account. (These are all net zero as far as the real bank account
is concerned.)

Another way to handle reconciliation is to never check off the
transfers between the accounts.  Reconcile should now work.
This has the disadvantage of slowly
filling the reconcile window with transactions you never intend to
reconcile. Theoretically by the end of the year you will have actually
disbursed all of the funds to charity and these would reconcile to 0 at
that time. Thus you could do a once a year clean up reconciliation.

Dale Alspach