How to do this ?

Frederic LESPEZ frederic.lespez@wanadoo.fr
29 Oct 2002 22:25:15 +0100


On Fri, 2002-10-25 at 21:18, Harry Helmich wrote:
> You would track those expenses by creating appropriate expense accounts. 
>  You can then monitor contribution to expenses by running reports 
> against your expense accounts (flat, power, phone, etc.).  At least 
> that's how I understand it.  I actually haven't started to use GnuCash 
> yet because I can not get the QIF import to work.  Invalid regular 
> expressions (previous post).  That's how I would do it.
Thanks for your suggestion.

At first, i thought it was exactly what i want, but when i tried  on
real case, i noticed i was flawed.
Indeed, it works perfectly well for expenses done with our own accounts
(ie not the joint ones).
But consider the following case :
I transfer $100 to our joint checking account.
Then I pay the phone bill ($86) with the joint checking account
Then my girlfriend transfers $50 to our joint checking account.Then i
Then she pays the power bill ($64) with the joint checking account.
In this case, the method you suggest doesn't work because the expense
accounts will be unable to track our individual contribution to shared
expense.

So finally, i will follow my girlfriend's idea:
Here is our account hierarchy :
Assets
|-Current Assets
|  |-My accounts
|  |  |- Checking account
|  |  |   |-Shared Expenses Contribution Tracker Account
|  |  | 
|  |  |- Savings account
|  |      |-Shared Expenses Contribution Tracker Account
|  |
|  |-My Girlfriend account
|  |  |- Checking account
|  |  |   |-Shared Expenses Contribution Tracker Account
|  |  | 
|  |  |- Savings account
|  |      |-Shared Expenses Contribution Tracker Account
|  |
|  |-Joint accounts
|  |  |- Checking account
|  |  |- Savings account
|  |
...

So using that hierarchy, whenever i contribute to shared expenses
(either by paying something with one of my accounts or by transfering
money from one of my accounts to one of the joint accounts) i use the
SECTA (Shared Expenses Contribution Tracker Account) account to do the
operation. These account have a negative balance equal to the
contribution to shared expenses made with their parent account.
So my contribution to shared expense is equal to the sum of all the
balances of my SECTA accounts.

I will then write a custom report in Gnucash to display our respective
conributions.

Fred.