Tracking Money in Savings Account

[Wayne Bird]

Thanks so much for your help!  I will continue to play around, and I'm sure I'll be back with more questions.

Though I used the envelope system in the past, it seems that's not the standard accounting method.  I tweaked MSMoney for years in order to make it "act" like an envelope system and I don't want to tweak GnuCash to do this, I'd rather just learn how GnuCash is designed to be used and use it accordingly.

> To: wrbird at hotmail.com; jmason at masondrywall.com
> CC: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Tracking Money in Savings Account
> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:11:04 -0500
> From: adardis at gmail.com
> 
> 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.
> >