invoicing non-gainful *expenses* for reimbursement

David T. sunfish62 at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 24 22:58:51 EDT 2011


I am well outside of my knowledge and comfort zone, but it seems to me you'd pay for the lumber out of your checking account into your Lumber account (reflecting your first transaction), and later, you'd have income from your client that would also go to the lumber account (lowering that amount). That's my low-tech way of handling reimbursements. If there's an issue about that income not really being income, then I'd set up that extra account that William mentions.


If it's a core part of your business model (and this is where my experience and training will no doubt show my naivete), you may want to look at the Accounts-Payable/Receivable methods for tracking this.

David



----- Original Message -----
From: William Colls <william.colls at rogers.com>
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Cc: cognitive.libertarian+ml at gmail.com
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2011 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: invoicing non-gainful *expenses* for reimbursement


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?
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