What's the best way to model "in-flight" transactions?

Alton Brantley alton.brantley at gmail.com
Thu Sep 28 13:13:26 EDT 2017


The way I handle this is to create a subaccount of my bank accounts labeled “Bank1:ACH” for automated clearing house.
Then the transactions look like this (where Db means debit, Cr means credit, and assuming credit card is paid $1000.00)
Bank1 is an account of type bank (an asset),
ACH is a subaccount of Bank1 of type cash (also an asset)
CreditCard1 is an account of type credit card (a liability)

When the credit card bill is paid:
CreditCard1 Db 1000.00
Bank1:ACH  Cr 1000.00
  This transaction reduces the liability (by increasing the credit available) and reduces the cash available in the ACH account(creating a negative balace). If I look at the Accounts tab, I can see at a glance what my bank account is according to the bank, and the pending deductions from that amount.

When the payment clears the bank:

Bank1:ACH Db 1000.00
Bank1 Cr 1000.00 
  This transaction reduces the money in the “float” of the ACH (by increasing the negative balance there), and reduces the cash in the Bank1 account, showing that the bank paid through the ACH.

It seems complicated (at first), so play with it in a dummy set of books. You’ll get the feel of it pretty quick. 
This is the only way I have found of being able to reconcile easily both the credit card statement and the bank statement without editing dates that make one or the other not map correctly.



> Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 05:39:09 -0700 (MST)
> From: replicon <replicon at gmail.com <mailto:replicon at gmail.com>>
> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Subject: What's the best way to model "in-flight" transactions?
> Message-ID: <1506602349864-0.post at n4.nabble.com <mailto:1506602349864-0.post at n4.nabble.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Hey all,
> 
> I've been using/loving GNUCash for almost a year now, and one thing I'm sure
> I'm doing wrong is how I'm showing credit card payments.
> 
> For paying credit card bills, I just use my bank's bill pay. The bank is
> different from the credit card provider, so there's some "in-flight" time
> for that money. The day the withdrawal shows up on my checking account is
> not the same as the day the payment shows up when I login to my credit card
> provider and check transactions there.
> 
> Right now, in GNUCash, I just do a transaction from checking account to
> credit card, and by convention, always adjust the time to reflect checking
> account, but I wonder if there's a more correct way to do it.
> 
> The best I can think of is to have a separate account for "in-flight"
> transactions between establishments, and turn the credit card payment into
> two transactions that go through this account. Is that the best way to do
> it? If so, what account type would that be? Would it be an asset, because in
> a way, it's like I'm loaning money to some imaginary entity for a while,
> which it will repay to my other account a day or two later? :)
> 
> Thanks!
> 


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