Any caveats to creating monthly Expense Accounts?

[Aaron Laws]

You may be interested in the Expense Bar Chart, too, to track monthly
spending in each account.


In Christ,
Aaron Laws


On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> samalex <samalex at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > For items I pay once a month like Mortgage, Cable, auto loans, etc I have
> > normal Expense accounts they go into, but does anyone know if potential
> > issues with me creating a new Monthly Expense column for like Groceries,
> > Dining, etc where I have multiple items per month?  This way instead of
> > having one bucket for everything I'll have monthly buckets I can organize
> > into years and months over time.
> >
> > Example it might be like this:
> > Expense - Household - Mortgage
> > Expense - Household - Cable
> > Expense - Auto - Loan
> > Expense - Auto - Insurance
> > Expense - 2014 - 01 - Groceries
> > Expense - 2014 - 01 - Dining
> > Expense - 2014 - 01 - Auto Fuel
> > Expense - 2014 - 01 - Entertainment
> > Expense - 2014 - 02 - Groceries
> > Expense - 2014 - 02 - Dining
> > Expense - 2014 - 02 - Auto Fuel
> > Expense - 2014 - 02 - Entertainment
> > ... etc.
> >
> > This would great a large number of expense accounts over time, but it'd
> give
> > a simple way to tell how much is in each expense bucket.  Also we get
> paid
> > not on the 1st of the month, generally a few days to a week before the
> first
> > so I generally try to mark any expenses after we get paid as the upcoming
> > month.  Example, if I got paid on 3/27 I'd say everything after this
> would
> > be an April expense.  So I can't simply go by date if everything is in
> one
> > Expense account.
> >
> > Anyway, I'm just toying around with this, and I wasn't sure if others had
> > tried it or if there are any fundamental issues that anyone sees.
>
> This is WAY complicated.  Just set up your Expenses:Groceries and put
> all your groceries in there.  If you want to see how much you spent then
> use a P&L or Transaction Report.  The transaction report can (IIRC) be
> set up to group by month to give you this information, and then it wont
> clutter up your Chart of Accounts.
>
> > Thanks for any advice --
> > Sam
>
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>
> -derek
>
> --
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
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