Expense vs Liability

[Dennis Powless]

This is so very confusing.  I guess I want to treat the medical bill
account as if it was a credit card where you will have periodic
increases and then pay on it monthly or from time to time.

While in the credit card account I use expense accounts just as I
would in the checking account to raise the balance.  This works fine
for that.  I'm not sure what to use to 'raise' the balance in the
medical bills account?  equity accounts?  I'm just confused as to
where the money comes from to raise the medical bill account.



However, having the assets account and the liability account does 'do'
what I need it to do.  But, the assets account does continue to rise.
The liability account does show the correct amounts (which is what I
needed).





On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 4:46 AM, Alex Hill <alex_hill at arach.net.au> wrote:
> I would also do the same if I did not need two seperate accounts to show the
> amount owing and paid. Using this method we can tell how much is owing (the
> liability account) but the amount paid is not listed anywhere as the expense
> account will show the full balance. If there are only a small number of
> bills it is easy to match payments to amounts (and hence only needing the
> amount paid figure to work out the amount owing) then this would be the most
> effective way.
>
> Alex
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Maf. King" <maf at chilwell.net>
> To: <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2010 5:03 PM
> Subject: Re: Expense vs Liability
>
>
>> On Saturday 13 November 2010 06:44:02 Dennis Powless wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I guess I'm just confused.  When someone in the family goes to the
>>> doctor we get a charge/bill for an amount, say 100.00 USD.  I need to
>>> enter this into GC some place.  What account would it go under?
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>
>> HI Dennis,
>>
>> I am not an accountant, but I'd handle it as follows (for personal
>> expenditure):
>>
>> if I pay the whole bill straight away, I'd use a transfer from say
>> checking to
>> an expense account.
>> If however, I was going to pay by 2 or more installments split over time,
>> I'd
>> put the expense into GC as a transfer to a liability account, then as I
>> pay
>> each installment there would be a transaction from checking to reduce that
>> liability.
>>
>> HTH,
>> Maf.
>>
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