How to create an asset with a reduced value compared to my regular currency (dollars)

[Ronal B Morse]

Adrian, is there a reason you treat the rebate as a negative expense 
instead of miscellaneous (non-taxable) income?  To me, the rebate is 
something you get rather than something you don't give, but my analysis 
could be incorrect, and if it is I'd like to know.

RBM


On 12/01/2017 06:02 AM, Mariano, Adrian V. wrote:
> I normally record rebates as offsets against the original purchase, so in your example below I would do it as:
>
> Asset:Bank -$1000
> Expense:Electronics $1000
>
> And then when the rebate arrives:
> Expense:Electronics -$100
> Asset:Bank: $100
>
> I don’t try to record the undiscounted prices of things, since I consider them basically irrelevant.  In many (most?) cases, original “undiscounted” prices are fictitious values whose purpose is to anchor the price so you feel better about the price you’re actually paying.   I’ll grant that for a $70 discount perhaps what I’m trying to do is overkill---but it seems like that depends on how much work it is to do it.   If what I tried so far worked it would have been pretty easy, just a few clicks more work than establishing a normal Asset:GiftCard account.  So why not do it right?   And now that I have run into trouble creating the account that has a 15% discount, I’m curious about how it can be done at all.   Is it indeed a simple matter to set it up the way I wanted?
>
>
>
> From: Christopher Lam [mailto:christopher.lck at gmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, December 1, 2017 3:21
> To: Mariano, Adrian V. <adrian at mitre.org>
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: How to create an asset with a reduced value compared to my regular currency (dollars)
>
> This sounds like an overkill. I'd write the original purchase as:
>
> Asset:Bank -$430
> Asset:GiftCard: $500
> Expense:Rebates -$70
>
> Whereby Expense:Rebates generally collects anything that was purchased at a discount, and I wish to record the original price as well as the discount. So, a discounted laptop could be recorded as:
>
> Asset:Bank -$900
> Expense:Electronics $1000
> Expense:Rebates -$100
>
> Other strategies are valid.
> [https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
>
> On 30 November 2017 at 23:11, Mariano, Adrian V. <adrian at mitre.org<mailto:adrian at mitre.org>> wrote:
> I bought a $500 gift card for $430 this week.  I would like to add this to gnucash as some kind of asset so that as I spend it, the correctly scaled amount gets transferred to the expense account I use.  In other words, if I spend $100 from this account it's really only $86.
>
> I tried to do this by creating a security fund and then using the price editor to set the price to 0.86.  But when I insert a transaction from the new account to an expense account, it doesn't apply the 0.86 factor.   What is the right way to do what I want to do?
>
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