Reconciling credit card (liability) accounts

[Ashvin Goel]

Derek,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

The problem with doing things automatically is that it may not match 
other people's method of using gnucash. In particular, I enter a future 
transaction in the credit card account once a month that debits from my 
bank account the same amount that I have spent this month on my credit 
card (I update this transaction manually every time I enter a new set of 
credit card transaction). This way my future balance in the credit card 
account is always 0 while my bank account shows what I will eventually 
have in it. With this approach, I don't need step 3 below. So I have to 
  press the cancel button every time the "Transfer Funds" dialog pops 
up. I know that has worked for me but it always raised a red flag, i.e., 
was gnucash still balanced, since I thought that gnucash brought up the 
"transfer funds" dialog only when there was some unbalanced transaction 
or reconciliation.

I guess the interface is a bit confusing. The problem is that there are 
two different things that can happen: 1) transfer of funds because your 
account is not reconciled, 2) transfer of funds because you want to 
record your payment. Logically, these are really different things even 
though the implementation of the transfer of funds dialog can probably 
be the same for both. For example, what happens with a credit card 
account when is not reconciled correctly, and you press the "finish 
button". Probably, the amount of funds transferred is the sum or the 
difference of 1) and 2), which is probably not what a user expects. 
Hence, given the current interface, I believe that it should do either 
1) or 2) but not both. Ideally, the current interface would do 1). A 
second interface would ask you whether you want to record your payment 
and then show the "transfer funds" dialog. In a perfect world, there 
would be a preference about whether the recording your payment dialog 
should pop up!

Thanks
Ashvin


Derek Atkins wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Ashvin Goel <ashvin at acm.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>I have a problem with reconciling my credit card (liability) accounts
>>that doesn't seem to occur with my bank (asset) accounts. With a
>>credit card account, when reconciling the account, I put the "Cleared"
>>amount in the ending balance when the first reconcile window pops
>>up. On pressing "Ok", I get the second reconcile window that shows
>>that the difference is 0.00. This is expected behavior. Then I press
>>the "Finish" button and now a "Transfer Funds" window pops up that
>>asks me to transfer the same "Cleared" amount from one of my bank
>>accounts to this credit card account. I think this latter window is
>>incorrect because the second reconcile window shows that everything is
>>reconciled correctly (difference is zero). This problem does not occur
>>when reconciling my bank account. Does anybody else have a similar
>>problem or is there something wrong I am doing?
> 
> 
> This isn't a problem; it's a FEATURE..   It's helping you record
> the payment on the credit card, assuming you're paying off the whole
> balance.  It doesn't happen on a Bank reconciliation because you're
> never expected to "pay off" a bank account.  ;)
> 
> The expected process is:
> 
> 1) Credit Card Bill arrives
> 2) You reconcile the bill against your account in gnucash
> 3) You pay the bill (and enter the payment transaction in gnucash).
> 
> The transfer window is just gnucash's helpful way to handle step 3.
> 
> 
>>Ashvin
> 
> 
> -derek
>