user/account mapping

[Jeff Kletsky]

On 3/4/2010 5:24 PM, Chris Burroughs wrote:
> 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.
>

In my opinion, as long as you have shared banking accounts that you need 
to reconcile, option (2) is a PITA.

We handle it with sub-accounts where we want to account for things 
individually. For examples:
Expenses:Discretionary:Bev
Expenses:Discretionary:Jeff
Expenses:Dining:Lunch:Bev
Expenses:Dining:Lunch:Jeff

Gifts to each other is a funky subject. What does it mean? Unless you 
insist that they come out of some individual discretionary pool of 
money, they are coming from joint assets. We just decided that they were 
accounted for like any other joint expense, and were budgeted as 
such.You could do it with two sub-accounts of gifts, or the like.That's 
a decision the two of you need to make. One way or another, you 
sometimes need to trust the other person when they say "Don't worry. 
It's in the right category." and not ask more!

Just what works for us...

Jeff