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

[adrian]

Tommy Trussell wrote
>> Adrian:
>> 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.
>>
> 
> 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)

Yeah, despite that I have been unable to actually subscribe to the list. 
But your point was you wanted more context, I suppose.  


>>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'm not sure what exactly is unclear.  I am thinking of the acquisition of
this card not as a purchase, but as a shift of assets from one form to
another.  So instead of $430 in the bank I now have a different asset,
namely $500 on the card.   Yes, it's true, I don't benefit until I spend the
money.  But the same is true of money in the bank.  

But it's not really $500 on the card because I only spent $430 on it.  It is
exactly like a currency exchange, though it's not obvious to me why this
means my goal is a very complex one.   It seems pretty simple to have an
exchange rate and have the card denominated in some currency, say the Gifta,
that is equal to .86 dollars.  When I buy something using the card I can go
to the card's account and list the expenses in Giftas and they will be
automatically translated by the 0.86 factor.   (I assume that if I made an
account denominated in, say GBP, that I would be able to get that to
translate to the USD that I use for my regular accounts; after all, this is
something that is important to many people.)  

Now actually I realized that the solution I was fiddling with can be made to
work. As I mentioned before, I made an account and created a security and
tried to set its price using the price editor.  For some reason the Price
Editor doesn't seem to do anything, but there is a column labeled "Price" in
the account I made, and if I set this to 0.86 (which I have to do manually
for every transaction, it seems) then things work as I was hoping.  (And I
notice that prices I enter in the ledger appear in the price editor even
though the reverse doesn't seem to be the case.)   It would be even nicer if
I could set the price once and have that same price stay in effect until I
change it, rather than having to enter it again for each transaction with
the default price being "1".  

Why do I care?  It's just so that my accounting correctly tracks my
expenditures in different categories.   I don't need to use accounting
software to do price comparisons, but if I want to know how much I spent on
Widgets this year---and I buy some using the card---the number will be
inflated if I don't account for the discount.  





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