invoicing non-gainful *expenses* for reimbursement

[William Colls]

Strictly, even though the item is an expense, it should show up in your 
income accounts. Perhaps create an account income:expense_reimubursement
to capture it.

For accounting purposes, the purchase of the materials should show up in 
your cost of goods sold expenses, and the gross profit will be correct.

HTH.

William.

On 11-07-24 09:25 AM, cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com wrote:
> I have some material expenses to pass on to a customer, without
> applying a markup.  I would like to have an invoiced item look like
> this, for example:
>
>    lumber   materal   expenses:lumber   50   $10    $500
>
> The problem is, GC is *forcing* the transaction to use an *income*
> account.  This makes no sense when you don't gain from simply passing
> along an expense.  I want to be able to browse the expenses:lumber
> account, and see -50 for my cost, followed by +50 for the
> reimbursement (this ensures that the balance for net lumber costs is
> accurate).
>
> The actual scenario involves a reimbursement of expenses from many
> different expense accounts.  These are reimbursements that rarely
> happen, and in fact may not recur again.  It would be quite messy to
> create an income account to mirror every expense account; which would
> result in accounts with just one or two transactions, and expense
> account balances that do not show the true net figure.
>
> The hack that's tempting at the moment is to simply configure
> "expense" accounts as "income" accounts, while still keeping them
> children of a parent named "Expense".  This would enable the
> invoicing to work with these accounts.
>
> What's the general approach in this scenario?
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>

-- 
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not 
sure that you realize that what you heard was not what I meant.