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

[Oon-Ee Ng]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 4:59 AM, Mike or Penny Novack
<mpnovack at mtdata.com> wrote:
> On 5/31/2016 3:02 PM, Oon-Ee Ng 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:-
>
> I can only tell you how I would handle this.
>
> 1) Like you I would create an account with a name like  "Outstanding Loans".
> But I would NOT  post transactions to this account. Instead it would be a
> placeholder account (parent) and under it I would create an account for each
> debtor as a debtor comes into existence.
> 2) When a debtor makes a payment, enter the transaction to that debtor's
> account. Likewise if the debtor borrows an additional amount.
>
> 3) THEN:
>    a) The balance shown for the "Outstanding Loans" account will be the
> total you have out on loan.
>    b) The balance of each debtor's account will  be the amount of debt
> currently outstanding for that debtor.
>
> 4) No, this will NOT mean having to always see a cluttered CoA. You can
> normally have the display property of "Outstanding Loans" collapsed. You
> only expand that when you want to see the individual debtor accounts (to
> enter another loan or to record a loan payment)
>
> Michael D Novack

Thanks, I'll try that out, it seems very do-able. Is there any
disadvantage to having many sub-accounts? I already have 3 dozen sub
accounts (give or take a few) for various things.