A way of managing a joint account

Maf. King maf at chilwell.net
Mon Sep 2 10:59:25 EDT 2013


On Mon 2 September 13 14:41:09 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.


Hi,

I think you are close to getting this right - I think that you have 3 sub-
accounts under the credit card, called MH, LT and J. That does make sense to 
me, although not strictly required (trade off data entry ease vs ease of 
calculation each month).  My key suggestion is that I'd treat the personal 
expenditure as a "loan from the joint card"

All joint expenses get spread around the relevant expense accounts, eg 
groceries, furniture etc., from the CreditCard:J subaccount much as "normal" 
from the docs.  

Stuff which you (or Lou) buy personally, gets assigned to an asset account - 
Asset:MH-on-joint-card or Asset:LT-on-joint-card, and tied to the appropriate 
sub-account of the card.  You can easily see what the total card balance is,  
and what each person owes.

OK, you can't track your own expenses, only the joint expenses this way.  I'd 
suggest that you only track the joint expenses within the joint GC database 
anyway, otherwise it will get messy and probably cause confusion at some 
point.

HTH,
Maf.



 


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