temporary allocation of money

[James P. Howard, II]

Derek Atkins said:
> Yep, that's about right.
>
> -derek
>
> fideli <faisalmoledina at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> say i had $1000 in my savings account and from that cash, and i would
>> like to make a note of the fact that i need $750 of that for a certain
>> purpose in the future.  so what i've done is i've created a
>> sub-account under my savings account (even though it doesn't really
>> exist at the bank) in gnucash and stashed the $750 there.  it makes me
>> wonder now what happens to the sub-account once i'm done with it.
>> from what i can tell, it'll just sit there with ageing transactions in
>> it, until i choose to close the book.  is this proper procedure?  i'm
>> not quite an accountant, so forgive me if this is a trivial theory
>> question.  thanks in advance!

I am not an accountant, so if this is for your own use, this is cleaner,
otherwise seek the advice of a CPA.

Temporarily transfer $750 to an equity account and don't mark the
transaction as cleared or reconciled.  Your account will a balance of
$250, but the reconciled balance will still be usable.  Then, when you
actually do spend the $750, just delete the equity transaction and mark
the money into the appropriate expense account.

James