Retirement acct withdrawal accounting

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Sat Apr 15 10:34:29 EDT 2017


> On Apr 15, 2017, at 5:39 AM, Eric Beversluis <ebever at researchintegration.org> wrote:
> 
> As I'm working on my taxes I realize that GnuCash as I've set it up doesn't give me a readout on taxable distributions from my retirement accounts.
> 
> I enter them as transfers from the relevant retirement acct to my checking, with expense entries for withheld taxes. So it would take a lot of digging and copying to a spreadsheet to get the totals from GnuCash. Of course I get 1099-R's that give me the total, but it seems to me that the accounting system should show this too.
> 
> I can't show it as a form of income, even though at the end of the year it is part of my taxable income. It really is a transfer. My net worth does not go up when I make a withdrawal from the retirement account.
> 
> Any ideas how this should be handled in proper accounting? Do I maybe set up another account ("Taxable retirement transfers"), enter the transfers there and then transfer again to checking and tax expenses? That seems rather Rube Goldbergian.
> 

From the retirement account register run Edit>Find and select "All accounts" from the listbox on the left, then select your checking account with the "select accounts" button. You can add rows to limit the date if you want a register view or you can run an Account Report on the find results and limit the date range there.

If you've used a consistent description, note, or memo ("Taxable Distribution" seems a good choice) you can search on that instead.

Regards,
John Ralls




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