Charge back to an expense account

[Ken Reto]

I have some questions regarding chargebacks, or perhaps invoices more generally.

Assume I pay a bill and wish to claim part of that cost from another party (ie a partial reimbursement). I create a bill with multiple items, with a single reimbursable item marked as billable, and hence I now have an item I am able to chargeback.

I create a new invoice allocated to the relevant customer and job. The billable item appears in the invoices item list as expected.

When setting the account in the "Income account" field, I am limited to using any type of account except an expense account. I can, if I choose, select an asset account or even a liability account, but not an expense account.

I would like to be able to offset the repayment by the customer of a share of the original bill against the original expense account against which an item was recorded.

While I can create an income account and record the payment by the customer as income, why am I limited to treating it as income when I want to treat it instead as a reduction of an existing expense?

The following thread also relates to, but does not appear to resolve, this issue: http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2005-December/015275.html. I agree with the third message in that thread (http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2005-December/015277.html) in that I do not wish to treat this as income.

The original cost is an expense to me. I create a receivable when I generate an invoice. The expense remains an expense if I do not get reimbursed, or is reduced if I do.

It seems most intuitive to me (as a user) to be able to create a bill for the original expense with either:

(a) 2 separate items, one billable for reimbursement and one non-billable, with the billable item later included in an invoice that is netted against the original expense account, or

(b) 1 billable item, with the billable item later included in an invoice that is netted against the original expense, and a discount applied to that item to reflect the fact that only a share of the original cost is reimbursable.

>From a design perspective, it seems logical to provide users with as much flexibility to record transactions as they see fit.

Thanks in advance.

Ken Reto