shared expenses/IOU accounting

[DaveC49]

Hi,
Gnucash is certainly capable of doing what you require. I use it to manage
separate accounts for my wife and myself and a joint accounst  and separate
debit and credit cards. The first thing is to have you asset and liability
accounts match your actual bank accounts and ownership of them. You can use
placeholder subaccounts to separate the individual ownership E.g.

Assets:Current Assets:Person A:Savings account
Assets:Current Assets:PersonB:Savings account
Assets:Current Assets:Joint:Cheque account

Liabilities:Person A:Creditcard
Liabilities:Person B:Credit card

with a similar structure for Expenses to manage how you split the expenses

Expenses:Rent:Person A
Expenses:Rent:Person B

Gnucash supports transactions with what are known as two or more splits. An
example transaction for an equal sharing of the rent of $300 could look
something like:
                                                                                   
Debit         |        Credit
Expenses:Rent:Person A                                                  150         
|
Expenses:Rent:Person B                                                  150         
|
Assets:Current Assets:Person A:Savings account                             
|          150
Assets:Current Assets:PersonB:Savings account                              
|          150

or even a combination of two transactions

                                                                                   
Debit        |        Credit
Assets:Current Assets:Person A:Savings account                             
|          150
Assets:Current Assets:PersonB:Savings account                              
|          150
Assets:Current Assets:Joint:Cheque account                    300

                                                                                  
Debit         |        Credit
Assets:Current Assets:Joint:Cheque account                                   
|          300
Expenses:Rent:                                                           
300            |

The structure of the accounts and the transactions is dictated by the detail
you wish to preserve and how you actually manage the sharing process.
Gnucash is a double entry accounting system so if the above transactions do
not make sense, you may need to become familiar with the concepts of double
entry accounting first.

In the first transaction set Expenses:Rent is a placeholder account while
the personA and PersonB sub-accounts record the individuals contributions to
the rent. Here the sharing is recorded in the Expenses sub account structure

In the second set the sharing is managed by the transfers into a joint
account before payment not at the Expenses end. It is perfectly possible to
replace the last line of the second transaction with the first two lines of
the first transaction. You will need to structure the accounts and
transactions to reflect how you share the expenses and when and from what
accounts you pay them.

David Cousens




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David Cousens
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