Transfers from outside accounts

Tommy Trussell tommy.trussell at gmail.com
Tue Feb 10 18:08:37 EST 2015


On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 9:45 AM, EngineInstitute <info at chinablueart.com>
wrote:

> Tommy,
> The partner is making it a loan to the company.
> How do I post this?
> Thanks.
>  <https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user>


I'm glad other folks have supplied all the warnings. I'll tell you a bit
about what I did and you can clear whatever hoops you need. I am certain
your situation will be different, but maybe you'll find it instructive.

In my case I am managing the books for two entities, and one entity loaned
money to the other. SO I get the fun of managing both books. I presume if I
make a mistake I my accountant should catch it. :-)

First I called the corporate/tax attorney and asked how to make the loan OK
by corporate and tax rules. I even supplied a suggested promissory note,
which the attorney's staff updated/corrected. The appropriate folks signed
the agreement.

Then I told my CPA it was about to happen. She supplied an amortization
table because I had asked how to deal with the interest income (to the
entity loaning the cash).

For my convenience, rather than using an amortization table I decided to
charge simple interest and presume a fixed payment roughly (rounded up to a
round number) equivalent to repaying the debt over five years (sixty
months). The borrower expects to pay off the loan in less than a year, but
you never know, so I wanted to set things up so we could sustain it as long
as it takes.

SO

I am going to show something that OUGHT to work, but doesn't. On the plus
side, it's slightly easier to show what's going on, and it's easy enough to
fix.

I created a scheduled transaction that looks like this:

[image: Inline image 1]

This is set to run on the first day of every month. As you can see I
entered a formula in the debit and credit fields. When the transaction
processes, it will ask for bal (principal balance) and days (the number of
days since the last payment). I have a tab with the principal balance
account showing on it, so I can just grab the latest balance from there. To
get the number of days, I have to remember how many days there were in the
past month. (In grade school someone showed me how to find 31-day months by
counting knuckles.)

Unfortunately in practice the formula doesn't work exactly right. The
Interest line works. HOWEVER for the Principal line GnuCash will insert the
interest amount again and put that in Inbalance-USD instead of subtracting
the interest from the payment.

[Formulas in Scheduled Transactions do not work consistently, or at least,
not as I expect, but I find it fairly easy to review and adjust the messy
transactions.) Since 400-(0.07*days*bal/365) didn't work, I also tried
eliminating the subtraction, thinking maybe (-0.07*days*bal/365)+400 would
work, but it didn't, either.]

For the other entity I didn't bother with scheduled transactions -- I have
been just entering the transactions "manually" instead. After the first
payment, when I go to key in the next payment GnuCash will copy the splits
from the previous payment. SO I find it very handy to key the updated
numbers into the memo line and copy and paste the expression into the
credit or debit fields. SO for example I can type .07*31*22,353.44/365 and
copy and paste that into the debit field, and GnuCash will happily evaluate
the expression, converting it to $132.90 for seven percent interest over
that 31 day month on a balance of 22,353.44.

Somehow that takes a lot more effort to describe than it does to get it
done. I hope I haven't confused things.

P.S.: If I got any of the formulas wrong, my apologies.

P.P.S.: If anyone can identify something "wrong" with my scheduled
transaction formulas, please let me know. I presume I ought to file a bug.
Bugzilla only shows two "SX formula" bugshttps://
bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=sx%20formulas : #103181 and
#670371 (both regarding loan transactions).




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