Different dates in Expense Voucher

Tue Jun 11 17:49:45 EDT 2013

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Hi Michael,

Thank you for your suggestion. I was thinking about doing something
like that if there is not a more elegant way to do it in GnuCash. The
reason why I would like to use Expense Vouchers, if possible, is that
they provide a nice way to collect receipts from a single employee for
a later payment. For example, I can have an open Expense Voucher for
an employee and add new entries for new receipts that I receive and
then later make a single payment that covers expenses for some time
period.

Having an open Voucher would be a good aid in keeping track of
expenses that have not be reimbursed yet. This could also be achieved
with having a separate liability account for each employee, as you
point out.

However, expense vouchers also have the benefit of logically
connecting an expense to a registered employee in GnuCash. This could
also be achieved with a separate liability account, but then I would
have to open an expense voucher for each receipt, which would make it
harder to keep track of un-reimbursed expenses.

For the above reasons I was hoping that there would be (or will be) a
functionality to automatically create a separate transaction for each
entry in an expense voucher, bill, invoice etc.

Thanks again for your quick response.

Best,
Jonas

- -------- Original Message  --------
Subject: Re: Different dates in Expense Voucher
From: Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com>
To: Jonas Lippuner <jonas at lippuner.ca>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Date: Tue 11 Jun 2013 10:54:26 AM PDT

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