Deposits as Liabilities or other?

Wouter van Marle wouter at squirrel-systems.com
Mon Jun 19 10:29:13 EDT 2006


> Well, Presumably your wife's family owns the widgets, so there should be some 
> sort of asset account to reflect their value. (eg Assets:Widgets)
> 
> Since GC doesn't do inventory for you, you could *maybe* split this into 2 
> sub-accounts, (rentable and rented) to reflect the number of widgets that are 
> "in stock" at any one time.
> 
> When someone rents a widget, I think you need to reflect rental income and 
> liability of the deposit.  This sort of thing may work for you :
> 
> Income:Rental		40.00
> Liability:Deposits	 2.00
> Asset:Bank(or Cash)		42.00
> Assets:Widget:rentable		-1
> Assets:Widget:rented		+1
> 
> What this will not show you (easily) is how much deposit is held for any 
> particular customer.  You could do this by sub-accounts under the liability 
> tree, or if the number of customers is small enough, do it by hand using 
> reports with the customer name in the memo field.

My suggestion was to use the unit as sub-accounts, customer names may
even be better.
Working with the "customer" feature sounds like a major overkill in
this; and will cause a lot of work. The plus is of course one could rent
on credit (or pre-paid) basis easier, maybe invoicing monthly instead of
daily, and it is possible to get reports on customers one by one.
Depends on what they want. By the way, by opening an invoice and every
day adding a day or rent if that customer rented it's unit, you can
easily keep track, and at the end of the month print and post the
invoice and done.

I would always go for separate customer subaccounts, so as to have a
much easier overview of which customer is owed what. Even if there are
only three of 'm - it's a helluva job to count it later by hand, and
prone to errors as well.

Wouter.




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list