user/account mapping

Chris Burroughs chris.burroughs at gmail.com
Thu Mar 4 20:24:59 EST 2010


My partner and I will soon be getting married and combining most of our
finances.  We are both currently happy consistent gnucash users.  We are
not sure exactly how to best use gnucash in the future.  We intend for
the vast majority of our finances to be combined, but there is a small
set of expenses we would like to keep separate (gifts for each other are
the canonical example) [1].  Options include:

1.  One gnucash account for the household and all expenses.
2.  one account for combined finances, and one each for separate.

(1) has the obvious advantage of simplicity, but complicates gifts and
such.  (2) would likely work well enough if the individual accounts were
small, but three accounts could quickly become unwieldy.  For example,
it would be annoying to manually merge and re-create reports.

We were wondering if there were other couples on the list and whether
(1) and (2) are similar to the systems they use or if there is some
other option provided by gnucash we have overlooked.

[1] A trivial web search will turn up many strong opinions on how
married couples should handle their finances.  I would appreciate it if
we kept those opinions out of this thread.  I don't to create any extra
work for the list moderators.


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