A way of managing a joint account

[Mike or Penny Novack]

"Trouble with this is that I lose the 'categorisation' I get from my 
normalaccounts where I can charge things to Expenses:Groceries or 
Ex:Hobbies or whatever."

That you say this indicates that your problem is with the fundamentals 
of double entry bookkeeping, not just how to set up the accounts but how 
to enter the transactions.

a) When you pay for something with a credit card that transaction should 
get recorded as a debit to the appropriate expense category and a credit 
to the credit card liability. You can break THAT into three sub 
accounts, MH's liability, LT's liability, and J shared liability.

b) Once a month (once a statement) you will have to manually allocate 
the liability for interest owed between these three sub accounts.

c) When either or both of you make a payment of credit card liability 
that would be a debit to that sub account and a credit to that person's 
checking account or however the payment was made.

Did that make things any clearer?

Michael




Mark Hanford wrote:

>Greetings, all. I have recently started using GnuCash for my personal
>accounts, and think I have everything mostly ticking over nicely. I do have
>one area though that's stopping me from ditching my spreadsheet-based
>approach at the moment, and that is to do with handling a joint Credit Card
>I have with my partner.
>
>Due to the perks of the account, we use the CC for all our joint
>expenditures (groceries, furniture, whatever) but also for various
>'personal' things to increase the cash-back.
>
>On my spreadsheet I simply list all the transactions and put a code next to
>each line for either MH (me), LT (partner) or J (joint). I can then simply
>SUMIF all the transactions for the three codes, giving me the amounts we
>have to pay each month. I pay (MH+(0.5*J)) and Lou pays (LT+(0.5*J))
>
>Reconciliation is simple, as the transaction match the statements, and I
>can still get spending breakdowns by payee.
>
>I can't work out how to reproduce this in GC though. I've tried having a
>sort of placeholder account for "Credit Card", and below that three
>accounts for MH, LT and J. I then import the statement into "Credit Card"
>and go through and charge all the entries to one of those sub-accounts.
>
>Trouble with this is that I lose the 'categorisation' I get from my normal
>accounts where I can charge things to Expenses:Groceries or Ex:Hobbies or
>whatever.
>
>If we ONLY used the account for shared stuff it would be easier, we'd just
>pay (0.5 * balance) each.
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There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.