personal and business

[Shane Litherland]

Hi Dave,

you might find other good tips directly relating to downloading bank
transactions and/or how to deal with mixed credit card txns, in old
posts, if you can search thru archives etc here. Or check out general
gnucash info relating to credit cards / liabilities. But you should be
able to tweak my suggestions to deal with it OK,
- possibly downloading all cc txns to a 'credit card' account (often,
gnucash sets a credit card acct in 'liabilities' for many default
setups)
then, either pay the full amount out from business, and an adjustment
for 'private drawings', or for each cc txn, you could mark the split as
paid from business or private accordingly.

That's not quite doing a full 'double-up' of the cc txn downloads but
still involves a bit of manual checking through to post each expense to
the right place... but it's probably good to keep tabs on what goes on
your cc anyway huh? ;-)

HNY to you too!
-shane


On Tue, 2010-12-28 at 14:18 -0500, Dave T wrote:
> Hi Shane,
> Thank you for your very helpful reply! 
> 
> 
> As I reflected on it more, my main requirement concerns credit card
> accounts. I find it unavoidable that both personal and business
> charges appear on my credit cards. Dealing with that appropriately
> will be my main GnuCash challenge, I believe.
> 
> 
> Without having used GnuCash, I don't know how others handle this. But
> I want to avoid things like this:
> - having to manually enter credit card (or other) transactions that
> could be automatically downloaded/imported.
> - having to download credit card (or other) transactions into two
> separate files and then go through both sets of transactions to delete
> business charges from one and personal charges from the other.
> 
> 
> I believe your suggestions will help me achieve that goal. If I have
> trouble, I'll post back.
> 
> 
> Happy new year.
> Dave
> 
> On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 5:38 AM, Shane Litherland
> <litherland-farm at bigpond.com> wrote:
>         Hi Dave,
>         
>         I've only gone part-way along combining personal/business,
>         i.e. I
>         basically use it for business records, but at times I have to
>         account
>         for expenses that have a private component, or I make private
>         (cash)
>         drawings.
>         
>         So, how I do this might get you on the starting blocks at
>         least:
>         
>         example - I get a rates or electricity bill, and most is
>         attributable to
>         business expense, but some is private:
>         
>         LIABILITIES:ACCOUNTS PAYABLE is where I put in the bill
>         (invoice to be
>         paid) in its entirety, and split the total:
>         
>         EXPENSES:PRIVATE DRAWINGS:UTILITIES:RATES (say, 10% of total)
>         EXPENSES:UTILITIES:RATES (the business amount, 90%)
>         
>         (i've glossed over the inclusion of GST or similar taxes to
>         keep this
>         example clearer to start with)
>         
>         I currently pay the bill 100% from my business cheque account
>         ASSETS:CURRENT ASSETS:CHEQUE ACCOUNT
>         
>         You could add a 'PRIVATE SAVINGS ACCOUNT' to your assets tree,
>         and e.g.
>         pay the relevant bills or portion of bills from each asset
>         account.
>         
>         To keep my whole expenses reports 'clean' for business
>         reporting (i.e.
>         only showing expenses that relate to business, not the private
>         expenses), I do a transfer at the end of each period (in my
>         case,
>         financial year) from each EXPENSES:PRIVATE DRAWINGS:...
>         subaccount, to
>         an EQUITY:PARTNER CONTRIBUTIONS:... subaccount
>         
>         If you don't mind having e.g. expense reports that show
>         combined
>         subtotals etc of private and business subaccounts then you can
>         probably
>         omit the latter step. Another variation, is to do the
>         transfers to
>         private equity, and if you want to run a report only showing
>         business
>         stuff, put an amount in for the transfer. If you want to 'see'
>         the
>         private amounts included in expenses and not bundled up in
>         equity, just
>         change the amount back to 0 if or when you want to run said
>         reports.
>         
>         I have another situation in Gnucash accts where some of my
>         'business'
>         income has to be attributed to me as 'personal services
>         income' (e.g.
>         consultancy/sub-contractor income) and reported on my personal
>         tax
>         return. For GNUCASH purposes, it is part of my business
>         income/costs,
>         but I have a string of about three sub-accounts to document
>         that
>         'private income' amount from the business INCOME account, to a
>         LIABILITIES:PSI ATTRIBUTABLE and then on to EQUITY:MY
>         CONTRIBUTIONS and
>         EQUITY:RETAINED EARNINGS.
>         This results in my 'equity / retained earnings' being a
>         balance between
>         the 'personal services income' and the amounts of any private
>         expenses/drawings at the end of each period when I do any
>         balancing
>         transfers as mentioned above. This whole process probably
>         warrants its
>         own discussion so if you find you might be heading down that
>         kind of
>         path with your accounts trees, let me know, otherwise just
>         consider it
>         'food for thought'.
>         
>         A final note, is that I enter all expenses as invoices, and
>         use that
>         aspect of GNUCASH that makes use of A/P and A/R but you can
>         still go
>         through the same process I've used by just entering split txns
>         directly
>         into a liabilities account/s.
>         
>         Leave it at that for you to digest, let us know if it's any
>         use :-)
>         
>         -Shane
>         
> 
>