Subaccounts [WAS Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets]

[Matt Graham]

Ah, true. I guess this is why I favored "triggered transactions " rather than "template transactions".

I want a transaction involving expense account "spending money" to automatically add two more splits to reduce the asset account "segmented spending money" balanced by increasing the value of "allocated cash" asset acct (increase = make it less negative).

For saving up for something expensive, I would still set up the above, but I would need to manually change the numbers if I wanted to return the allocation to zero.

So when I enter:

Cr account I used to pay insurance 1150
Dr expense account for insurance (with the trigger attached) 1150

I would want gnucash to automatically add the splits

Cr account I am using to segment insurance money 1150
Dr account showing allocated cash 1150.

I would the (during my reconciling/budget review) need to amend that transaction (or create a new one to return the insurance allocation to zero.

For many of my other money allocations (eg restaurants/cafe) I wouldnt change it - underspending means the money is available for later.

Am I understanding you right?


Thanks and regards,
Matt


-------- Original message --------
From: Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com>
Date: 30/1/18 09:31 (GMT+10:00)
To: Matt Graham <matt_graham2001 at hotmail.com>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: Subaccounts [WAS Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets]

On 1/28/2018 8:11 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
........ When you look at what liabilities really are, Adrien and I concluded on this thread that this situation (segmenting money for future) is really using a separate asset account. After all - creating a liability INCREASES your cash available. .......
Yes, the problem precisely, we aren't assigning the same meaning to "available" and "liability"

But your example of what you would like to see:

Template transactions (I'd probably call them "Triggerred transactions", but it doesn'tmatter) sound awesome. As someone else highlighted, there are implementation difficulties to consider, but I dont think that it would be too onerous.

In terms of spending from another account but recording against a sub-account, its easy:
Dr Exp whatever account
Cr Cash I pay for something awesome
Dr Parent account the amount I paid
Cr sub-account the amount I paid

SPECIAL CASE of a GENERAL requirement. The special case might be easy to implement BUT in general the amounts are NOT going to be the same.

This is actually a fairly common situation for me, say one of the organizations SELLS a tee shirt (fundraising, but tee shirts might also be being given away to volunteers).
Db   Cash
Cr   Sales
Db   Cost of goods sold
Cr   Tee shirt inventory
    << the shirts might be being sold for $20 but cost the organization $7 >>

Or, and though this is common with our restricted funds (not exactly matching) I will give an example precisely for your situation. You socked away into this reserve $100/mo toward the annual renewal of your car insurance based on your ESTIMATE of what that annual bill will be. But when the bill arrives it is for $1150 or $1250. In both cases you pay the bill and release the restriction, yes? << in one case, you had more in the fund than needed but it still can be released to general purposes, in the other you used all of the fund AND had to add some general funds >>

Michael D Novack