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

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 9:14 AM, adrian <adrian at mitre.org> wrote:

> There may be technical accounting reasons to treat rebates as offsets to
> expenses rather than income.  But my own reasons are simply that it's what
> makes sense to me.  I don't really track income very carefully.  I mainly
> track expenses.
>
> [cutting the definition of rebate]
>
> In the case at hand I spent $430 on the gift card and when I buy something
> that costs $100, I'm really only spending $86.  That's what makes sense to
> me for how this ought to be counted.   Since I don't know the category of
> the expense in advance, I can't just put in a $70 offset unless I put it as
> "misc", in which case I lose track of some information about how I
> allocated
> my money.
>
> So does anybody have advice on how to solve my original problem?
> <https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user>
>

I went back to your original question (remember that this is NOT a forum --
it's an email list that you're viewing through Nabble)

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?


I think you have demonstrated the difficulty with what you're trying to
do-- you're trying to make a rebate card a different KIND of currency,
which in one sense, it is. HOWEVER every time you make a purchase from that
card it will require a currency exchange, which adds a level of complexity
and may not produce the result you want.

I'm sure you could make it work, but in the end, it's a lot easier to just
offset the $70 against the expenses. TECHNICALLY you don't get benefit of
the full amount you spent on the card until you have completely depleted
the value of the card, but that would be a PITA (sorry for the acronym -- I
mean "difficult").

I think the real answer is to go back and think about what it is you want
to achieve.

I am inferring that you want to shop at the vendor's store and be able to
know the "discount" you have achieved by buying the special card. I presume
you might want to do that for price comparison purposes when shopping at
OTHER stores. Is that it?

I don't have the answer -- I'm just trying to help specify the issue.