monthly (but not date based) income/expense report

[Michael Hendry]

On 16 Sep 2014, at 07:12, Don Coleman <don at coleman.org> wrote:

> 
> I'd like to be able to generate a monthly report, but not based on a
> strict calendar month (date based), but based on a somewhat arbitrary
> scheme -- each transaction manually assigned to a particular month,
> loosely related to the date.  This is actually for a couple of people
> who have a shared bank account to pay shared bills.
> 
> Each transaction in the bank account is either a bill or a payment from
> a person  (for their share of a particular month) -- so I assign each
> transaction to certain months as appropriate. The bank account starts
> with an initial deposit, and I want to make sure that each "month" is in
> balance ... so I'd like a scheme for reconciling each "logical" month.
> 
> Currently I create a separate gnucash file for each year, and gnucash
> accounts for the actual bank account *and* for each month.  When I
> import the transactions from the bank, rather then assigning a bill to
> "expenses/utilities/gas" for example, I instead assign them to "may", or
> "june", etc.   So then when looking at the bank account, I can see that
> each is in fact assigned to a month, and looking at each months account,
> I can see that it ultimately reaches a 0 balance (or if not, I know to
> figure out why)
> 
> Is there a way to do this in a standard way in gnucash?  It doesn't seem
> to fit gnucash's concepts of a budget, nor  accounts payable nor account
> receivable…

This isn’t really a Gnucash problem, rather one of the underlying book-keeping.

I’m entirely unqualified in accountancy or book-keeping, but I’d approach it like this.

Create a current asset for Alice and Bob - let’s call it:-

Assets:Current Assets:AB-Bank.

This will receive an initial deposit - presumably paid in by Alice and Bob, and split between newly-created Equity:Alice and Equity:Bob accounts, and eventually repaid to Alice and Bob when their association ceases.

For simplicity, let’s regard all payments made on behalf of Alice and Bob from AB-Bank as attributable to Expenses:AB-Bills - you can obviously break this down into a more detailed tree of accounts.

A bill comes in, is paid for by cheque drawn on AB-Bank, and the transaction is posted to AB-Bills.

Periodically, you decide how much Alice and Bob will be charged in a particular month, and post this as a ledger entry between AB-Bills and two new accounts, which are...

Assets:Current Assets:A-Liability
Assets:Current Assets:B-Liability

…with a “Description” field reading “Alice & Bob - charges for May 2014” or similar.

You tell Alice and Bob how much they owe for this period, and when they pay up the money goes into AB-Bank and is posted to A-Liability or B-Liability appropriately.

I’d be inclined to record transactions on the dates on which they actually occur, and to tweak the liabilities for particular months using the end-of-month liability transactions - e.g. to deal with the effects of a particularly large heating bill expected early in the next month; in this case, AB-Bills will go negative until the heating bill is paid.

Looking at the register for AB-Bills, you can see the balance rising as bills come in and are paid, and falling (usually to zero) as you transfer the charges to A-Liability and B-Liability at the end of each month.

Invoicing Alice and Bob for their liabilities would be possible, but probably overkill.

Best of luck!

Michael