Credit card/overdraft credit limit & available funds?

[David Gillam]

I've thought of a potential (unconventional) way of doing this within GnuCash.

Create you new credit card account with an opening balance of NEGATIVE whatever your credit limit is.  If your credit limit is $10,000 on that card, set the opening balance to $-10,000.  Then as you charge things, the negative balance becomes smaller (closer to zero), and as you make payments, it becomes larger (further from zero).

If you use this method, you'll get your desired display of remaining available credit, but it will probably cause your balance sheet to show less liability than you have in reality.  In turn, this will make it look like you have more available assets than you really do.

To overcome this imbalance, I believe you can create an expense account to hold the offsetting values of the credit card limits (positive values to offset the negative values mentioned above).

Cheers,

David
Gillam Data Services, Inc. - Computer Training, Consulting, & Service
dave at davegillam.com | www.davegillam.com 



On Aug 26, 2012, at 11:30 PM, prl <prl at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> I can't see how I'm asking for anything that is incompatible with double-entry accounting. All I'm asking for is for GnuCash to be able to display the difference between a balance and some other number associated with the account. I'm not asking for the account balance to be interfered with in any way.
> 
> If my credit limit on a CC is, say $4000, and my CC liability account shows a balance of, say, $2345, then I'd like a display (perhaps in the bottom bar of the register) saying something like Available Funds/Credit/Whatever: $1655
> 
> My bank can display this for me from its accounting information.
> 
> David Gillam has also suggested that the same effect can be achieved by using a (new for GnuCash) tracking account type, but I'm not certain of exactly how that would operate.
> 
> 
> On 27/08/12 13:47, Yawar Amin wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> On 2012-08-26 20:59, prl wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> 
>>> All I want is the ability for GnuCash to tell me the difference
>>> between the balance in my credit card account and some fixed limit. [...]
>> GnuCash doesn't have this as a feature. I don't recall if anyone's ever
>> talked about trying to simulate it on this mailing list. If you can fit
>> the concept of a credit limit into the framework of double-entry
>> accounting (I can't think of a way), certainly go for it, and let us know.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Yawar
>> 
>> 
> 
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