[GNC] representing shared accounts (personal)

[Adrien Monteleone]

I think the wiki in the ‘using GnuCash’ section has just this very example of sharing living expenses.

I would create either an asset or liability account called “reimbursements”. (I have a sub account for each family member under this, but in your case, you’d only need one) It doesn’t matter which one really, but I’d put it wherever the balance is likely to remain positive for most of the account’s life. (my family members owe me, more often than I owe them, so I keep it under assets)

If you pay the utility bill in full, only expense your portion. The rest goes to the reimbursement account.

When you get paid back, that is split between cash/checking and the reimbursement account.

When you pay your spouse back, same thing in reverse.

You could try to maintain a sub-account of the bank account for your spouse’s portion and then simply not include that sub-account in your balance sheet report, but trying to keep up with it might get tedious. You could do transfers and correcting entries using this same method though at the end of each period/year you want to run a balance sheet for.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Apr 30, 2019, at 1:45 PM, Jeff Abrahamson <jeff at p27.eu> wrote:
> 
> I have a bank account that I share 50/50 with my spouse.  We each pay in
> a certain amount each month, we use the money to pay utilities and
> things like that, occasionally to reimburse individual expenses.
> 
> When I calculate my net worth, I include half of the value of that account.
> 
> When I compute expenses, a payment into that account isn't an expense,
> but half of every payment outbound is.
> 
> So for payments from me to the account, it's just a transfer.
> For payments from the account to me, it's a transfer, but it probably
> ought to someone cancel some expense entry.
> For payments from the account to (say) the electric provider, I just
> make everything a split: half to the expense, half to something else.
> For in/out to/from spouse, it's something, maybe a transfer to the above
> something else.
> 
> I'm not really sure what that something else should be, though, because
> it's not income, and it shouldn't be sticking around in my net worth
> (equity) when my spouse reimburses himself.
> 
> Any suggestions?  This is personal accounting, but I still like to try
> to do things in a way that respects the half millennium of experience
> that accountants have in modeling these things.
>