Advice for setting up house budget with roommates

[Jason Ahrens]

Patrick Clery said the following on 29/10/2007 9:23 PM:
> What I would like to know is has anyone here setup a similar system for a 
> shared living situation and could share how they did it? We have tried to set 
> this up except it became redundant having to enter Can anyone recall of any 
> similar examples of this in the mailing list archives?
>   
I've done similar but I'm the central bookkeeper for my situation so the
house funds are all tracked through my regular finances. In my
situation, the others don't care about tracking of individual expenses
for  themselves, so what I do is the following (4 people situation):

1) Create an asset account for each roommate.
2) When a purchase is made I credit the person who made the purchase for
3/4 the value in the asset account
3) I debit everyone else 1/4 the value in the asset account. My 1/4 goes
to the proper expense type for my own tracking.

I pay rent, so Rent comes out of my chequing account and gets charged
appropriately.

4) When people pay me back, I credit their Asset account either toward
my Cash or Chequing account, as appropriate.

I'm note quite sure how you'd work a house-only account though. You may
need to get into some of the "small business" components...

Jason