joint or shared checking accounts

Adam Monsen haircut at gmail.com
Fri Dec 31 16:17:28 EST 2004


I have a joint checking account with my partner, and I'm rather
confused about how this could best be handled in gnucash.

We deposit equal amounts, and generally split everything paid for with
funds from the account. For instance:

her: deposit $10
me: deposit $10
both: buy dinner for $20

Net profit should equal out, but my income and expenses will be double
what they "should" be, at least for my individual accounting needs.

The only thing I can think of is to just leave her income and expenses
out of the picture. For instance, here would be an interpretation of
the above pseudo-transactions:

me: deposit $10
me: buy dinner for $10 (half of actual bill)

This seems kinda ugly. Maybe it's better just to enter all the data
(including her half) and have separate accounts for expenses, like
Food:Dining *and* JointChecking:Food:Dining, and separate income
accounts, like Income:MyOwn and Income:Hers. This sounds a bit ugly
too. For now, I'm just entering all funds into the joint account from
Opening Balances, and expenses in the accounts I already use, like
Food:Dining. This will skew expense budgets, but I guess since we'll
be sharing money are budgets are generally different anyway. Weird.

Anyone have any suggestions on how this could be better dealt with?

-- 
Adam Monsen <adamm at wazamatta.com>
http://adammonsen.com/


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