Help with GnuCash! Why is there a “Rebate” column in the Expense account on GnuCash?

[Derek Atkins]

"David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Robby--
>
> In Gnucash, "categories" are handled by having separate accounts.
>
> If you hope to track individual charges on your credit card, then each
> transaction will have a separate entry in the credit card
> register. Say you go to a gas station today and buy $20 of gas. You
> pay with your credit card. You put a transaction in your credit card
> register that takes $20 from your credit card and transfers it to your
> Expenses:Gas account. You'll see that each has a $20 balance. Do it
> again in a week, and you'll have $40 in each. Then you pay your credit
> card balance with a check. You put a transaction in your check account
> register for $40, and your credit card balance will be $0 again, and
> your checking account will be $40 smaller.
>
> When you want to find out how much you spent on gas, create a report
> that shows transactions to the Expenses:Gas account, and a time frame,
> and you can see that you spent $40 on gas this month.
>
> Does that clear anything?

Just to add to this explanation, if you need to separate out "Personal
Gas" and "Business Gas" this is best done using separate Expense
accounts.  I would recommend two hierarchies, e.g.:

Expenses:Personal:Auto:Gas
Expenses:Business:Auto:Gas

This will allow you to easily see how much you spent on Personal
expenses and how much you spent on Business expenses.  However this
makes it a bit harder to see "how much did I spend on Auto:Gas".

Your alternative would be to create Personal and Business subaccounts of
each main type of expense.  E.g. Expenses:Auto:Gas:Personal,
Expenses:Auto:Gas:Business.  This would make it easier to see how much
you spent on Auto:Gas, but much harder to see how much you spent for
personal expenses v. business expenses.

> David

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available