How to account for "saving up for X"?

[Mark H. Wood]

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Perhaps a simple question but I can't get my head around it.

Every month on payday I put some money in the bank which is dedicated to
various purposes:  a fixed amount for the month's groceries, another fixed
amount for annual vacation, and so on.  All goes into the same savings
account, so the bank reports a single balance.

But I'd like to split these up in Gnucash, so that I can tell how much
money I have for each purpose.  I want my savings account balance in
Gnucash to track the balance reported by my bank, but I also want to see
e.g. the vacation money separately and to reduce it when I take money out
of the bank account to spend on vacation.

One problem is in putting the money into the "dedicated" accounts.  When I
deposit money in the bank, the left entry goes to the bank account and the
right is already claimed:  it goes into income:salary.  So I need another
transaction to dedicate a portion of the money I just banked, and that
needs two accounts.  I can take it from expense:vacation but to where does
it go?  Since it represents money in my possession, it's an asset, but
what is it and where should it lie in the account hierarchy?

Another problem is that I want to be able to see easily both the amount
the bank thinks I have and the amount that I can spend on incidentals
without compromising my dedicated savings.  I guess the only way to do
that is for the above-mentioned second transaction to take money out of
the bank account and put it into a subaccount.  I'm resisting this for
some reason, but at least I'd have both balances:  the bank's notion in
the Chart of Accounts and my nondedicated residue in the superaccount
ledger.

Comments?  I seem to have provided my own solution, but I have no
confidence in it.

- -- 
Mark H. Wood, radical centrist     OpenPGP ID 876A8B75     mhwood at ameritech.net
No amount of clipart will save dull writing or an uninteresting topic.
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