Handling many small-value loans (short, medium, and long-term)

[Aaron Laws]

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 3:02 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm using GnuCash for personal finances (myself and my wife's accounts).
>
> Currently I have a 'Outstanding Loans' account which keeps track of
> money either of us has loaned out to individuals. Something as simple
> as passing a twenty to a friend who's short on cash, or using our
> credit cards to help a family member purchase an online item.
>
> It got quite hard to track what had (or hadn't) been returned, so I
> created a second 'Settled Loans' account which I would move
> transactions to once they were paid off in full. So the typical way
> things would work would be:-
>
> 1. I lend one dollar to friend A and record it as a transfer of one
> dollar from my cash account to the 'Outstanding Loans' account.
>
> 2. When the dollar is repaid (perhaps by an online transfer to my
> savings account), I record that as a transfer of one dollar from the
> 'Outstanding Loans' account to my savings account.
>
> Once in a while I 'clean up' the 'Outstanding Loans' account by moving
> paired transactions from it to 'Settled Loans', so its easier to see
> loans which have NOT been re-couped. Otherwise all I have to go on is
> the total amount, which is tedious to go through (primarily because I
> have many of these transactions, especially in terms of helping do
> online payments for less tech-savvy family members).
>
> Disadvantages is the clean up is very manual. I hardly make mistakes
> but it does cause a problem when loans extend over the financial year
> end. Hardly a big issue but something I think could be done better,
> but can't figure out how. Any suggestions?
>

I have Accounts Receivable subaccounts for companies where I often have
such accounts: Menards, amazon, Wal Mart, etc. I also have an "Other"
subaccount which has been sufficient for the rare occasions that we
purchase for friends, etc. The "Other" subaccount is used, for instance,
when we purchase bulk food for us and 3 friends. It gets confusing when
these transactions overlap. In this case, creating subaccounts is the best.

It sounds like you have a situation where you have something of a revolving
set of accounts so that it wouldn't be practical to have named
sub-accounts. I don't have any other advice, and I don't know of a feature
in gnucash to help you.