How to manage funds on hold

[Conrad Canterford]

On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 18:01, Gerard Beekmans wrote:
> I've got a question how to manage funds on hold, ie: when you deposit a cheque 
> into your bankaccount which then gets put on holds for x amount of days 
> pending the cheque to clear. This thus creates a difference between the bank 
> accounts balance and the available balance for withdrawal. For day to day 
> banking it's the latter number that means most to me.

We've had this question before, and I'm afraid there is no easy way to
deal with this as far as gnucash 1.6.x is concerned. The general
approach I believe is to enter the transaction for the held amount "in
the future" - for the day it becomes available rather than the day it is
actually deposited. Note that this will confuse reconciliation,
especially if you have both instant and held amounts in the same
deposit. It is not recommended.
One solution which comes to mind which you may find suits your needs is
to create a sub-account of your (gnucash) bank account, and deposit held
amounts into this sub account. When that money then becomes available,
you can do a transfer from the sub-account into the real account.

> Is there an option to put (part) of a deposit on hold (ie: it not reflecting 
> in the assets until a set date, or a change is manually made)?
> Would this be classified as an "Accounts Receivable" I would be needing to 
> setup?

This is an interesting way to tackle the problem, which I don't think
has been discussed previously. You certainly could do it this way, but
you are setting yourself up for a significant amount of extra work
(you'll have to go and "receive" the payment for the "invoice" that
represents the on-hold amount when it moves into your account). This
work will be manual - there is no automaticness in A/R or A/P unless
Derek has snuck something funky in while I wasn't paying attention.
Note also that this is effectively the same as what my suggestion above
does, though this approach is more formalised (and in my opinion, more
work than is really necessary).

 If that's the case, how would I go about it? I read info in the manual 
> about A/R and A/P but I didn't see how to set it up (where to create it, what 
> type of accounts they are, etc).

A/R and A/P are only available in the current beta release series (1.7
versions). If you're using 1.6 (as I assume you are), you are welcome to
upgrade and help test (and many of us are using it with real data).
Alternatively, wait until 1.8.0 is released very early in the new year.

If any of the above doesn't make sense, or if someone else has a better
suggestion, please speak up! I might pretend to know how to answer these
questions, but I'm a businessman, not an accountant  :-).

Conrad.