Credit card and cash-flow

[Mark Eackloff]

Matej Cepl wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have a problem. I am keeping our home accounting in GNUCash with the
>current file beginning sometimes in the March of 2003. I was asked
>yesterday by my beloved wife how much we spent on particular types of
>items. "Wonderful", I said to myself, "finally the hours I spent typing
>data in Gnucash will pay for!". Well, I cannot say that it is what
>happened. See attached Cash-flow report (used as an advice from gmane.org
>search of this newsgroup; BTW, the Czech is badly broken, but that's
>another issue, which I do not want to deal with now). After looking through
>the report I was quite surprised, that we spent just $18.40 on Dining,
>because I am positive that we spent much more than that. I thought that and
>my only conclusion is that GNUCash included all these expenses under the
>account Liabilities/Accounts Payable/Credit Card, which is partially
>correct (I paid most of our dining with the credit card), but generally
>speaking it is very much misleading, because of course I want the the
>credit card payments to be spread into different Expense accounts.
>  
>
When youy enter your credit card charges the debit goes to the "Dining" 
expense account.  The credit goes to the liability account for that 
particular credit card.  This is a non-cash transaction.  So unless you 
change the setup for your cash flow report it will not appear.  When you 
make a monthly payment against the credit card balance, this payment 
shows up in the cash flow report because it involves cash ( or the cash 
equivilant, your check ).

To get your charges to your credit cards to show up in the cash flow 
report:
   1)  Open the report.
   2)  Click the Options button on the main window.
   3)  Click on the Accounts tab at the top of the newly opened Cash 
Flow window.
   4)  Scroll down in the list of accounts to Liabilities.
   5)  Expand the Liabilities account.
   6)  Click on the particular credit card account to select it.
   7)  Click the OK button for the window.
This will include in the report the transactions in that credit card 
account as through all entries in it were cash equivilants.

>Other problem which I was not able to solve is that what I would actually
>like to get is a monthly average on the individual accounts for the given
>period. I have searched this group extensively, but basically the only
>answer I've found is that I've got a tough luck and that it is not useful.
>However, it seems to me that such report would be incredibly useful for any
>budgeting. I am non-programmer, but I have written good number of small
>scripts (Bash, Python, mainly). Yes, I know that it is a  Lisp-like Scheme
>(and I hate zillion of nested parenthesis), but if it means just to add
>couple of defuns into some existing report, that I think I could try to do
>it. So, if there is some non-difficult way how to mangle the current report
>to do that I would love to make an effort to do it -- any suggestions where
>to begin?
>  
>
Run the report for a year and divide by 12.

To do this open the options window as explained above.  Click the 
"General" tab.  Change your "From" and "To" dates.  Click OK.

Mark

>Thanks a lot for any answer,
>
> Matej
>
>--
>Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej
>GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB  25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
>138 Highland Ave. #10, Somerville, Ma 02143, (617) 623-1488
>
>Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be
>a completely unintentional side effect.
>      -- Linus Torvalds
>         New York Times, 28 Sept 03
>  
>
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