[GNC] help setting accounts to track contributions

[Matthew Pounsett]

On 4 May 2018 at 09:05, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com
> wrote:

> On 5/4/2018 4:13 AM, Gio Bacareza wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> My partner and I are moving in together and we'd like to share expenses
>> like groceries, rent, etc. So we'd like to track expenses as well as our
>> appropriate contributions to make sure that we both are contributing
>> equally to house expenses.
>>
>> How should I set up the contribution? Under what main account type should
>> it be? Any recommendations?
>>
>> I am going to suggest something more straight forward than treating
> contributions as "income", less distorting to what the situation is.
> Imagine that this were an ordinary (business) partnership, income,
> expenses, and partner's "drawings" or "contributions" (partner's drawing
> accounts are under equity, representing each partner's investment in the
> enterprise). In other words, you can look in a standard accounting text
> under "accounting for partnerships".
>

This doesn't sound straightforward at all.  What's complicated about
treating joint contributions to the household coffers as "income" to the
household?  Treating that income as ever-increasing equity would confuse
P&L and cashflow calculations, wouldn't it?


> OK, this is a special sort of partnership that only has expenses, no
> income. So the drawing account of each partner will only show
> contributions. Going to be very easy to see if the total contributions are
> equal or not.
>
> In other words, a funny set of books, in effect just "expenses" and
> "equity" trees with meaningful content. You can leave the top level parents
> "assets", "income", and "liabilities" in there, but usually these would
> have no contents. Or perhaps because of how you run your household, they
> might. For example, could be a "cookie jar" for small amounts of cash held
> on hand, so something under assets. Or there might be a situation where one
> partner pays a large bill but that partner's contributions are already
> higher. So treat that as a loan to the partnership and now something under
> "liabilities"
>

It seems to me that a household is just as likely to have liabilities and
assets.  In our case, there are credit cards, the mortgage, and the house.
There might also be a car, or any number of other assets jointly owned.