Pay with Credit Card, split bill from cash with friend, how to reconcile budget?

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 19 February 2016 06:45:08 Jill Terry wrote:
> Not sure if it's the "correct" way, but I would simply make another
> expense account, reimbursable, then put the $40 owed in that.  So your
> credit card transaction would be...
> 
> Bill                                $60
> dining              $20
> reimbursable    $40
> 

That's the principle indeed. I would have chosen to make "reimbursable" an asset account, 
because it's money someone else owes you.

This transaction shows the following:
1. you spent $60 with your credit card (which goes into the split in the credit card account)
2. $20 of this amount was spent for my diner (and hence should go in your dining expense 
account, lowering the budget)
3. $40 was a short loan to my friends and they will reimburse it.

The moment your friends pay you back, you make transactions between your cash or venmo 
account and the reimbursable account. At the end the reimbursable account should have a 0 
balance again.

The added benefit of having such a reimbursable account is that you can see at a glance if 
someone still owes you money (that is when it has a non-zero balance).

This all assumes you have sufficient understanding of double-entry bookkeeping which 
gnucash heavily relies on. If you don't understand that yet, you can read the first few chapters 
in our nice concepts and tutorial guide.

Regards,

Geert