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

[nvsoar]

On 12/06/17 12:44, adrian wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html
Hmmmm.  Seems to me that you received a $70.00 gift along with the card.
nvsoar