Subaccounts [WAS Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets]

[Matt Graham]

Hi Dave!

Yep, that is pretty much the conclusion I’ve come to. Not sure what you are asking about in “where are you balancing the funds”. The Cr and Dr are balanced in the example. Maybe you are asking the location in the hierarchy for the accounts? It all goes up to the root account “Assets”. For this idea, I had Current Assets, Fixed assets, and Allocated Assets. All the little allocation accounts were stored in the Allocated Assets branch.
They were balanced by a single account under current assets called “AllocatedCash” (as per the example below). This is the weird one – a negative asset account that reflects how much I SHOULDN’T spend out of current assets unless I am spending on my allocated causes.

As per Adrian’s discussions, if you are spending out of the account that you have put your sub-account into, then there are less splits and it is far easier to understand. Using Adrien’s idea, at WORST you have a couple of transactions that are just as complex as every transaction the other way – but this is only in the rare event that you spend out of a different account from that which your sub-account is in.

I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around Adrien’s most recent email, so that could create some more “Aha!” moments too.

Thanks and regards,

Matt

From: David T.<mailto:sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 31 January 2018 2:31 PM
To: matt_graham2001 at hotmail.com<mailto:matt_graham2001 at hotmail.com>; Adrien Monteleone<mailto:adrien.monteleone at gmail.com>; gnucash-user at gnucash.org<mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: RE: Subaccounts [WAS Re: Future allocated money vs Budgets]

Matt,

I see one huge problem: where are you balancing the funds for the allocated accounts? They need balancing, and once you add something to balance them, you might as well male them Subaccounts of checking anyway.

Cheers,
David

On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 4:06, Matt Graham
<matt_graham2001 at hotmail.com>

[Snip]
If, rather than a sub-account, I use a separate asset account then there is no balancing Cr to an asset to increase the allocation. In your example, you had a balancing Cr on the parent when you allocated the money. So, we receive a $1000 pay check, and want to allocate $500 to the four accounts:
Cr Income: Salary $1000
Dr Asset:Current:Checking $1000
Cr Asset:Current:AllocatedCash $500
Dr. Assets:Allocated:Vacation    $250
Dr. Assets:Allocated:Insurance  $150
Dr. Assets:Allocated:Dining      $ 50
Dr. Assets:Allocated:Coffee&Tea  $ 50