Investments contributed to from outside source

David Reiser dbreiser at earthlink.net
Wed Mar 9 22:57:20 EST 2005


On Mar 9, 2005, at 8:59 PM, Jason Ahrens wrote:

> At my work, I am part of anemployee share purchase program.
>
> What this means is taht for every X number of dolars from my pay I put 
> towards
> purchasing company stock, the company puts in Y additional. Y is not 
> money
> that shows up anywhere except on the stock purchases.
>
> This means that while my take home pay is PAY-X, where X is a value I 
> put
> towards stock purchases, there is an aditional Y.
>
> Y is a value I do not know how to account for in GNUCash. Should I 
> count it as
> Income/Payroll? It does not seem right as it is never a value that 
> appears on
> my pay, it just 'appears' in my Stock account.  Perhaps I should 
> create a
> separate Income account for these contributions from my company?
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
> Jason

I use the separate account method you mention, even though it does 
cause me problems with some reports. For each paycheck I have (along 
with several other splits):

Income:Salary-mine  PAY
Income:Employer retirement match Y

And then I keep 2 'outgoing' splits (even though they go to the same 
account):

Assets:Investment:Retirement-mine  X
Assets:Investment:Retirement-mine  Y

Viewed in the Income account, the income splits are in the Income 
column, and the Assets splits are in the Charges column.

I'm sure the accountants will chime in with how it should be done. I 
certainly haven't resolved all my questions about the ways I think 
about income and retirement accounts. 'Y' is certainly income, but it 
is deferred income, and sometimes I don't want that included in 
reports. OTOH, I do want to keep up with what those numbers are. Last 
year there was a slight discrepancy among the 3 versions of the account 
(mine, employer's, and investment entity's), so it was useful to have 
the entries.

Dave



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list