Noob question about rebates/savings

[Yawar Amin]

Hi, glad you like Gnucash, see below:

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Yves S.
Garret<yoursurrogategod at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>  Here's what I did and my question.  Today I bought tea for $2.99.
> However, after scanning in my Stop & Shop card, it gave a "savings" of
> $0.49.  So, I ended up paying only $2.50.  I would like to keep track of
> that $0.49 deduction.  I created a brand new file and went to the Groceries
> account.  I entered the $2.99 and then put in the $0.49.  The problem is
> that it deducted the amount and failed to record the those forty nine cents.

Yes, if you put in a mathematical expression like 2.99-0.49 into any of
the amount fields Gnucash will do the calculation and put in the
resulting number automatically. To keep track of deductions, what you
want is to put in the original price (2.99) as the Groceries expense and
then put in the Stop & Shop rebate (0.49) as an income. So you do need
to create a Stop & Shop income account and credit that in each of your
transactions. The best way to input transactions is definitely the
General Ledger, under the Tools menu. It lets you specify the debit and
credit side of each transaction just like a normal bookkeeping journal
entry. You might need to refer to the help material a bit to get exactly
how it works.

>  I set the view to Transactional Journal (not sure if this information will
> matter or how much), it seems to give me a nice view of things.  It gives me
> the impression of having a single transaction/overall purchase.  However,
> when I switch to Basic Ledger it just breaks up the transactions into
> nonsensical individual lines (I tabulated how much I spent on each one of my
> items that I bought for my groceries), which leads me to think that I'm
> using the tool incorrectly...

No, you seem to be doing what you wanted to, i.e. record how much each
different item cost. I.e. this is what I think you're trying to do: you
bought groceries (cauliflowers and potatoes) and paid with your Visa. So
you tabulated the items like follows:

Debit Expenses:Food:Groceries $2.23
Memo: 1lb potatoes

Debit Expenses:Food:Groceries $1.29
Memo: 0.5lb cauliflowers

Credit Liabilities:Visa $3.52

In the General Ledger, you should be seeing all the items tabulated like
that, more or less. But in the Expenses:Food:Groceries account register,
you should be seeing a single line for that transaction and in the
Transfer field it should have `-- Split Transaction --'. It's like
looking at the general journal (what Gnucash calls the General Ledger)
and an individual T-account (the account register).

Hope this make sense.

Cheers,

Yawar

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