creating a split transaction

[Mike or Penny Novack]

alfo990 wrote:

>I have tried repeatedly to create a split transaction of a credit card bill
>to "money owed to me" and "expenses". This never seems to work properly; is
>there maybe some step by step guide other than the gnucash help & tutorial
>files which help maybe a little?
>
>Thanks
>Al
>  
>
 From just this it isn't clear what your problem might be so just guessing.

Are you perhaps trying to do this split while PAYING the credit card 
bill? As opposed to when  entering the individual transactions ON the 
credit card statement? What I am saying here is that perhaps the trouble 
you are having isn't a gnucash problem but a basic bookkeeping problem 
(and you would have the same problem were you keeping books the old 
fashioned way pen and ink on paper).

I am guessing here that some entry (some credit card transaction) is 
partly for you and partly for somebody else. That is the transaction 
that gets split. Let's say that you and X went on a trip and had agreed 
to split the cost of gas. So for every time you stopped and bought gas 
using your credit card you would have  a split transaction recording that

db                            cr
Expenses:gas
Assets:loans:X
                      Liabilities:credit card

Eventually you pay some or all of your credit card debt and that 
transaction looks like
db                            cr
Liabilities:credit card
                      Assets:checking

Note that I am using the old fashioned terms intentionally, db = debit 
and cr = credit (whether these increase or decrease the balance of an 
account depends on whether that account is on the debit or credit side 
of the ledger. But it should be making it clear that when you make a 
payment on your credit card that transaction has nothing to do with what 
the individual items on the credit card statement were for. Those go 
with the original transaction when you assumed the liability, not when 
you paid it off.

Michael