Family usage of gnucash

[James Wilde]

Luiz, Valery, I don't think you can handle this kind of situation in one single set of accounts.  Or rather, if you were to try, it would become very complicated.  Let me add some comments inline in Luiz explanation.
On Dec 26, 2009, at 19:09 , Luiz Carlos da Costa Junior wrote:

> Hello all,
> Let me participate in this topic.
> 
> As far as I understood, Valery was not referring to multiple access to
> GnuCash files, but to how should be the set of accounts in GnuCash if a
> family (let say, husband and wife) wants to track their accounts considering
> that they have separated accounts but share some of them.
> 
> Maybe it happens because my lack of knowledge (I consider myself a beginner
> in GnuCash and also in accounting/bookkeeping), but I have some difficult to
> model the following situation:
> 
> 1) I have my account "Husband:Bank"
> 2) My wife also: "Wife:Bank"
> 3) We share some bills and we also have some individual bills/expenses
> 4) For instance, this month I have paid $100 for the gas bill (shared) with
> money from my account "Husband:Bank". In GnuCash, it would look like this:
> 
> *Description   Transfer            TotDebit TotCredit*
> Gas bill
>              Family:Expenses       100.00
>              Husband:Bank                    100.00
> 
> What should I do to track that now my wife own me $50.00?

You also have to handle the situation as follows:

	Family:Expenses		80.00
	Wife:Bank				80.00

So now husband owes wife 40.00, with a net effect that wife owes husband 10.00.

Additionally you will have expenses which are not intended to be shared, such as the husband's weapon purchases, the wife's makeup purchases and the child's ice-cream purchases.  Or maybe the child's ice-cream purchases are to be shared by husband and wife.

I would suggest that one way - possibly not the best - to solve this is to have four 'companies' or sets of accounts.  One set will be for husband, one set for wife, one set for child and the fourth set would be some kind of joint venture.

How about this:

Husband's accounts

Husband:Bank			100.00
Joint expenses		60.00
Personal exp.		40.00

At month end:

Joint expenses			60.00
Joint venture			60.00

Similarly the wife would have:

Wife:Bank				80.00
Joint exp			50.00
Personal			30.00

Joint expenses			50.00
Joint venture			50.00

I'll leave the child out for the time being.

In the joint venture accounts the husband would enter:

Capital:Current account:Husband				60.00
Gas									20.00
Food								40.00

Wife would enter:

Capital:Current account:Wife					50.00
Food								30.00
Electricity							20.00

It will be easy to see from the income statement that the total expenses to be divided for the month are 110.00, which means 55.00 each.  There would therefore be entries as follows:

Husband's accounts:

Husband:Bank			5.00
Joint venture:				5.00

Wife's accounts:

Wife:Bank					5.00
Joint venture				5.00

JV accounts:

Capital:Current account:Husband		5.00
Capital:Current account:Wife				5.00

And the balance on each partner's current account would be 55.00.

The problem is that I think it would be very difficult to get an income statement over the shareable expenses directly from a single set of accounts.  Each person wants to see how much their income is and how much their personal expenses are, and therefore needs a set of accounts of their own.  Similarly, both partners need to see an undiluted statement over their joint expenses so that they can jointly decide where to cut back or when they can do maintenance work on their joint house, whcih means that they need the joint venture accounts.

Even simpler, of course, would be if they decided in advance that their joint expenses would be in the region of, say, 200.00 per month, and each put 100.00 each month into a joint bank account for which both have a chequebook, and from which either can pay joint bills.  But even with this method, you need one set of accounts for each person, and one for the joint venture.  This method does have the advantage that only the husband needs access to his accounts, only the wife to hers, and both need access to the joint venture accounts, which would, however, have to be on one or the other computer.

//James