Need help tracking monthly bills

[David T.]

Hi Chris,

Welcome. Glad to hear you’re working through the learning curve. 

I see that Dave C. has suggested using Accounts Payable, which is the Accountingly correct way to handle this. In my own experience, this was like trying to drink water from a fire hose, and I never got very far with it. Of course, it all may make perfect sense to you, so you might want to try it.

I recently had a similar kind of problem. I was wanting to compare my charitable donations between last year, and this year. What I did was create a multicolumn report that included two copies of a simple transaction report for the accounts in question. The one on the left column covered last year; the one on the right covered the current year. Since they were sorted the same, I could quickly see what had been included previously and what was missing currently. I imagine you could do the same for last month and this month. Note that it’s not a perfect solution, but works pretty well for me. Multicolumn reports are a little odd, but with a little work, they can be very informative.

Cheers,
David T.

> On Dec 4, 2016, at 8:50 AM, Chris via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi, I recently switched from using Excel spreadsheets to GNUCASH to
> manage and track household finances. The learning curve has been
> difficult but not impossible and I now have a more comprehensive view of
> of everything.
> 
> Now to my problem. Our monthly bills come in various formats and some
> like the home mortgage don't send monthly statements at all. I have a
> tendency to forget which have been paid and one thing the spreadsheet
> provided was a quick glance to see which were paid and which ones
> weren't. I am trying to achieve the same in GNUCASH. Scheduled
> transactions don't seem work well for this.
> 
> The closest I have come is using a transaction report but it only
> provides half of what I need. I have been able to customize the options
> to show what bills have been paid (what accounts have been posted to
> this month) but it doesn't show which have not been paid (not posted to
> this month). I have selected all of the appropriate accounts but can't
> find a way for it to show. Ideally It would show the one's not paid as
> zero for this month.
> 
> As I'm new I suspect I am missing something simple or some feature I
> haven't explored yet so any help would be appreciated.
> 
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