Tracking Money in Savings Account

[Anthony Dardis]

Nice.

The Suburban Dollar page may be missing a nice thing that GnuCash does  
here: check the "Include subaccounts" box in the Reconcile Information  
dialog, and all transactions against the subaccounts are included in the  
reconcile. So the objection "but you would essentially be tracking your  
expenses twice" doesn't look like it applies: for example, you spend money  
out of the envelope (the subaccount) and it goes to whatever expense (or  
whatever) account you select, even though in the real world the money came  
 from the one parent account.


On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:13:54 -0500, John A. Mason  
<jmason at masondrywall.com> wrote:

> I use sub-accounts. My checking account has 24 different sub accounts in
> it... "Envelopes" if you will. My Checking account itself is actually a
> placeholder account... meaning you can't have any transactions in it.
> Instead, ALL transactions are in a sub-account of the checking account.
> That way, when I look at the book (the account list) I see in the total
> column the sum of the sub-accounts... and that's the amount I use for
> reconciliation.
>
> Another thing I've used before was scheduled transactions. I had my
> usual expenses (water, electricity, etc.) rounded up to the next hundred
> dollars. Then I put in a scheduled transaction to automatically pop up
> 90 days ahead of time. Planning to make sure I had enough for those
> grossly high amounts means that when I actually get the bill, there is
> ample left over to either pile into savings or throw at a debt to pay
> off. Your mileage may vary.
>