Different dates in Expense Voucher

[Michael Hendry]

On 11 Jun 2013, at 18:18, Jonas Lippuner <jonas at lippuner.ca> wrote:

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> Dear all,
> 
> I sometimes get receipts from employees for reimbursement of money
> they spent months ago. As an example, let's say an employee gives me
> two receipts in June for money they spent in April and May. I would
> then create an new expense voucher and in the entries list the two
> items with the appropriate date when the money was spent (i.e. the
> date of the receipt). Then I post the voucher and process a payment,
> which will be a single check that the employee gets for the two expenses.

I am not an accountant, but I reckon what you need to do is think of this in two stages:

1. Employee E spends some money (perhaps on several occasions) on behalf of the company, which is then in his debt.

2. At some later date the company repays this debt.

You need to set up a new account, a Current Liability, called something that means "Stuff bought by E", and post the details from the receipts. The dates you enter for these transactions are the dates on the receipts, and the transactions are between the relevant expense accounts (e.g. Fuel, or Stationery) and the "Stuff bought by E" account.

Once you've repaid E, you record the expenditure through your checking account's register, but recorded against "Stuff bought by E", not the individual expense accounts. which have already been debited.

This way, you can accumulate records of numerous separate items of expenditure and associate them with the correct dates, and deal with the reimbursement when it arises - it could even be after the end of the financial year.

You might want to have separate accounts for different employees, but this is probably not necessary.

Michael

> 
> The problem is now that the two entries show up in the expense account
> with the post date of the voucher rather than the date of the entry
> (i.e. the date of the receipt). This is a problem because I would like
> to have the date in the expense account be the date when the money was
> actually spent. Because for this specific project, we have a budget
> entry every month, but if I only get the receipts later I still want
> the expense to show up in the month when it was actually incurred.
> Otherwise that account will be under budget for a few months and then
> over budget later.
> 
> I tried unchecking the option "accumulate splits" when posting the
> voucher, but that still creates a single transaction (albeit with
> multiple splits now) with a single date (the post date) and so the
> receipt dates get lost again. The desired functionality would be that
> GnuCash creates a different transaction for each entry in the voucher,
> so that the different dates are preserved.
> 
> Is it possible to do this in GnuCash? If not, what would be the best
> way to handle this situation? Note that it also applies to invoices (a
> customer pays several things on the same invoice that have different
> income dates) and bills.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the help,
> Jonas
> 
> 
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