personal financing: how to record receiving of a gift (not fixed asset)

[Zhang Weiwu]

Greg Troxel 写道:
> Zhang Weiwu <zhangweiwu at realss.com> writes:
>
>   
>> Stupid question: I received a gift from a friend, I know exactly how
>> much it cost because I wished to buy it in first place. I wish to record
>> this. This gift is not a fixed asset (Let's say if it's wine), so
>> actually after I had it my net value didn't increase. I think, rather
>> instead my expense should increase, thus I created a transaction from
>> Income -> Gift account, to Spense -> Wine.
>>
>> Is this the correct way to do? Or should I make transaction from gift to
>> assets and from assets to expense? I think that way doesn't make much sense.
>>     
>
> I would say that no, it's not correct.
>
>   
Thanks for giving conditional assumings as I didn't give what I want 
exactly in the original post.
> If you want to carry wine as an asset, valued at cost, and take an
> expense when you drink it (or open a bottle), you can record the wine as
> gift income balancing with a an increase in wine assets.
>
>   
No I don't want to carry wine as an asset.
> If you treat wine as outside your net worth (which is normal I think),
> then it is not proper to record this transaction at all.
>   
Why? I don't know why I should not record it, but there is a good reason 
(not financial reason at all) to keep it at least somewhere: I wish to 
keep in mind my friend's good intention and wish to repay him some day 
if I got the opportunity to come across an item in the shop he probably 
likes. I of course don't need to repay him the exact amount, but I just 
wish to not to forget it. And, the personal financial tool happen to be 
the most convenient place to keep this information, otherwise I have to 
place a "gift note.txt" in the same folder as the financial files.
>  
> If you want to pretend that you got a cash gift and then bought wine,
> you can record this as gift income, increasing cash, and then a wine
> expense, decreasing cash, but this isn't what actually happened.
>
>   
Why do I wish to pretend?
> The real question is: what are you trying to accomplish?  If you want to
> record gifts of objects not carried as assets, then by all means make a
> list in a file.  But pretending that such objects are assets when
> received as gifts but not when you buy them seems odd and unwarranted.
>
>   
Yes I wish to record gifts of objects not carried as assets. I probably 
should keep it in a separate file, but I don't know what bad thing will 
happen if I keep it in GnuCash? It's the most convenient and I don't see 
the down side doing so. There is actually another upside: I can easily 
get a sum of a friend's gifts through years as or not as assets; 
otherwise I have to count the total of his gifts as assets in Gnu Cash, 
and open "gift notes.txt"to sum the consumed gift together manually, to 
get an impression how much I got from him in total.


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