Reimbursable Expenses as a Volunteer

Sandeep Mukherjee mukherjee.sandeep at gmail.com
Sun Jan 5 00:02:48 EST 2014


Reimbursable expenses are not really expenses, since in the long run
you don't really pay for them. They are actually a special kind Assets
known as "Accounts Receivable" or "A/R". So find that account in your
GnuCash file, or create one if it doesn't exist. Then you can do
something like this when you pay for food, say with your bank card:

Food expense to be reimbursed:
    DEBIT   $5.00   Assets:A/R
    CREDIT $5.00   Assets:BANK-ACCT

Later when you receive the reimbursement, you can enter:

Food reimbursement received:
    DEBIT   $5.00   Assets:BANK-ACCT
    CREDIT $5.00   Assets:A/R

At the end of the accounting period, check the balance in the A/R
account. If non-zero, someone owes you money!

Hope this helps,
Sandeep


> Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2014 21:44:36 +0000
> From: Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com>
> To: daniels <danielrsilva8 at gmail.com>
> Cc: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: Re: Reimbursable Expenses as a Volunteer
> Message-ID:
>         <CAL=0gLsfnjhyQ4oSSPNTb_Pna838xq3i-=VW0=9FTjgcLOC16g at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 4 January 2014 11:44, daniels <danielrsilva8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have searched the mailing list archives and Google for a case similar to
>> mine, but it seems that must people that ask this questions are either
>> consultants or self-employed and are going to get the reimbursement from
>> their clients, so I wanted to make sure that I was doing the right thing in
>> my situation.
>>
>> I work as a volunteer and get reimbursed expenses from the food that I buy
>> during the week. In most cases I have seen, people setup an assets account
>> called "reimbursable expenses" and credit it with x, while taking x from
>> their cash account for example. Is that the best practice? What if I wanted
>> to know that that expense was actually food, so that I still wanted to track
>> how much I spent on any given week on food, even though it wasn`t me that
>> was actually going to pay it at the end of the day
>
> You could use sub accounts of the reimbursable account for food, fuel, etc.
>
> Colin


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