Unable to create liability account under expense account

[Buddha Buck]

You should talk to your accountant about how to set up your accounts to
handle this type of transaction. Your proposed solution (a liability
account under the concrete expense account) is not how I would do it, and I
believe is generally not considered the proper method of doing it. Things
may be different according to the common accounting practices of your
jurisdiction, which is why you should talk to your accountant, and not to
us, about how to do it.

Expense and liability accounts are very different things. They do not show
up together on the same reports, they measure different things (expenses
measure what money is spent on, liabilities measure money is borrowed from
other people), and they have different balances (expenses have debit
balances, liabilities have credit balances). They can't generally be mixed
or added together.

In general, in GnuCash and other accounting packages I've worked with,
sub-accounts must be the same general "type" (asset, liability, income,
etc) as their parent account. The value/balance of the parent account
includes the balance of the child accounts. When you see an account name in
GnuCash like "Expenses:Non-Taxable:Charity:Church" That implies that there
are total expenses, some of which are non-taxable, some of which are
charities, some of which are to the church. The total non-taxable expenses
includes those going to charities like your church, your local Makerspace,
the local soup kitchen, as well as non-charitable non-taxable income like
(in the US) mortgage interest or healthcare. Putting a liability account in
such a roll-up would not make sense.

For your situation, I would have an A/P liability account completely
separate from the Material Expenses hierarchy, and when I received an
invoice for cement, I would create a transaction that debited the cement
expense account and credited the A/P liability account. Then, when I paid
the bill, I would create a transaction that debited the A/P liability
account and credited the associated cash/banking account.

If you use the "Business Features" within GnuCash it will handle the
details in the previous paragraph semi-automatically, including creating
the A/P account.


On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 2:30 PM Suresh Saragadam <saragadamsuresh at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I am working on a small construction work where i need to record my
> expenses for both material and men (labour)
>
> Initially i need to create expense accounts for
>
> sand, stone,cement, under Total Material Expences
>
> Total Material Expences
> |_sand
> |_cement
> |_stone
>
> i am purchasing cement on credit(Loan) that is accounts payable i.e.
> liability
>
> Here i need to create liability account for cement under material expenses,
> but i am unable to create a liability account for cement under material
> expense account
>
> so that i can record total material spend including liability for cement
>
> this is very minimum accounting requirement.
>
> Regards
>
> Suresh
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>