Accounting treatment for travel reimbursements

[Mike or Penny Novack]

A couple of things.

1) I am not understanding why you are treating the hotel bill and the 
restaurant bill differently. You are correctly treating the first as not 
YOUR expense (but an expense of your employer -- you are temporarily 
lending the money) but treating the food as your expense and then either 
later correcting by the "rebate" method or by considering the 
reimbursement non-taxable income.

2) Your trouble with a "rebate" greater than the expense is because of 
seeing these (usually) more user friendly column labels instead of debit 
and credit. You are later "crediting" the expense (reducing it, the 
natural balance of an expense account is debit) to cancel it out which 
is correct as your employer's expense, not yours.

Michael


Edward Doolittle wrote:

>I've been using gnucash for years ... such a great, useful application.
>I've been able to figure out the answers to most of my questions, with the
>help of help documents, mailing list archives, and the published book, but
>I still have a couple of questions. They're really about accounting topics,
>not gnucash per se, but everyone on this list is so helpful I thought I
>would ask.
>
>One question I have is about the proper accounting treatment for travel
>reimbursements from my employer. For example, suppose I take my personal
>vehicle on an overnight trip for work. I pay for a hotel room, meals, and
>fuel using my credit card. When I return, I fill out a travel form and I am
>reimbursed according to the following scheme:
>
>- Full cost of hotel room (up to a reasonable maximum; let's say $150 for
>one night in a given example)
>- "per diem" rates for meals (something like $8 for breakfast, $12 for
>lunch, and $20 for dinner) regardless of the amount actually spent (unless
>a meal or meals have been covered by another organization, in which case I
>get $0 for that meal, of course)
>- "per km" rates for travel (something like $0.40/km)
>
>The treatment for the hotel room seems clear. I have an "accounts
>receivable" account in my asset tree, so when I pay the hotel,
> dr. accounts receivable $150
> cr. credit card $150
>When I receive the reimbursement a few days/weeks later,
> dr. chequing account $150
> cr. accounts receivable $150
>
>Less clear is the treatment for meals. What I'm doing now when I pay $25
>for dinner, say, is
> dr. expenses:food:dining $25
> cr. credit card $25
>When I receive my reimbursement,
> dr. chequing account $20
> cr. income:non-taxable:travel reimbursement $20
>
>One of the issues with my treatment of meal reimbursement is that there is
>no account in common to the two transactions for meals, unlike accounts
>receivable for the two transactions for the hotel room. I suppose I could
>take a "rebate" from expenses:food:dining instead of treating it as
>non-taxable income. Would that be better? Should I treat the situation
>differently if I paid less for the meal than what I received in
>reimbursement? It would seem strange to be rebated more than the cost of
>the meal.
>
>For mileage, the situation is even less clear. Only a fraction of the $0.40
>is needed to offset fuel expenses (say $0.10/km for fuel). The rest, in
>theory, could be used to cover part of the cost of tire wear/oil
>changes/other regular maintenance, and part could be used to offset vehicle
>depreciation, I suppose. However, I don't plan to book depreciation for the
>vehicle until I sell it (that's my understanding of the "cost principle"
>... there is no tax reason for me to book depreciation regularly, if I
>understand correctly). So setting the proportion of the $0.40/km to go to
>maintenance vs. depreciation seems to involve an arbitrary factor and to be
>unnecessarily complicated. On the other hand, the way I'm treating mileage
>now is pretty much the same as the way I'm treating meals, and has the same
>drawback.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
>  
>

-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.