monthly (but not date based) income/expense report

[Don Coleman]

On 9/16/14, 9:31 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:
> 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
I"m too am neither an accountant nor a bookkeeper ... I'm just trying to
solve my accounting problem... and being a user of gnucash, I figured a
way to do it... but it feels a bit too hard...

It's perhaps true that this isn't really a problem gnucash was designed
for ... thought it's actually does it fairly well... mostly the
transaction matching is a total mis, so I have to manually specify each
transaction -- it's always matching the *previous* month.

Your doesn't really provide the information I'm looking for ... in my
world, Alice and Bob "pay" their bills many days after the bills were
actually paid (since the bank account has at least a month and a half
worth of expenses pre-deposited, so there is no rush), and so new
month's bill debit often show up before past months get paid, and
credits appear even later ...  so I never would actually see it go to
zero, as everything is overlapping in the single AB-Bills account ...
which is why I created 12 "AB-BIlls" accounts, to keep stuff separate on
a monthly basis.

And I don't really care what Alice and Bob owe individually, so no need
for the pair of Liability accounts ... and in fact in my situation, we
have 7 people...  so I really don't want each bill to turn into 7
transactions I have to enter.  My concern is that the months balance to
zero ... if Alice and Bob (and the 5 other dwarfs) get their payments
confused between them that's their problem ... but I need to know that
the bank account is balanced, as Alice or Bob can disappear, and I don't
want to be left holding the debt.

I actually have a program into which one inputs the monthly bills, and
it allocates individual charges (it's driven by a database, so it's
dynamic and knows about bills and people), and it creates an OFX file
reflecting the expected bills and payments ... I just have to load the
OFX file into the correct month in gnucash, and then match them with the
actual bank transactions (accepting the bank date/info when I import
those transactions) so I can confirm the bank's reality and my model of
it match...

I've been considering using an alternative mechanism to get the data
into gnucash ... the gui is in my way... perhaps a python script... some
stuff written for the gnucash mobile helper app looks promising...

Don