My technique for Pending/processing transactions

[cdn42]

Hi,

I use GnuCash to manage my personal finances, and I've been using it for
about 2 weeks now with a little success; now that I have a system in place
which I think works rather well I thought I would see if it might help
people out, if not garner some conversation by posting about my method.

So here's the thing. When I was new to GnuCash, I was basically entering in
transactions for the dates that my bank was *due* to post it - which was a
little infuriating, and hard to guess sometimes, since Bank of America is a
little screwy with the dates.

After a little digging on this mailing list, this is the method I now use.

I have this hierarchy of accounts:

Assets:Checking
Income:Pending
Expenses:Pending

When I spend money, I enter in the value from my receipt as an
Expenses:Pending transaction out of my Assets:Checking account. I then mark
it as cleared (c) when my bank knows it has depleted from my available
balance. The same for any salary payments - they are new/not cleared (n)
before my bank knows about it, then when it shows as 'processing', I change
it to cleared (since it now affects my available balance). When it posts, it
can be reconciled (y).

Sometimes it's a bit of extra legwork but the elegance and quality of my
data makes it worth it.

Eventually when those transactions *actually* clear I reconcile the account
against my statement, keeping the dates on my books as the date I know I
made the purchase. The post date not matching the transaction date doesn't
irk me. The description field on my statement always includes the purchase
date anyways.

This way I can also open up the Expenses:Pending account, and look at the
current pending transactions at a glance. Anything I know to have posted can
be moved into the relevant Expense account. If I want to see the total in my
bank account, I look at the 'cleared' total in the bar at the bottom. My
last bank statement should tally with the 'reconciled' balance, my 'Present'
total shows me how low the balance should be at the end of the day when my
planned transactions clear, and my 'projected minimum' shows me how reckless
I can afford to be with my remaining funds. Even if I have
as-yet-unreconciled transactions sandwiched between reconciled ones. I'm
quite sure this is the way you're supposed to use the n/c/y system, and it
works quite well.

A lot less inelegant than using the statement date and NUM fields.

What are other people's preferred methods of dealing with pending
transactions?



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