[GNC] Revisit Topic: Reimbursable Expenses

[Adrien Monteleone]

Steven,

A Reimbursables account will usually be an asset or liability. In your case, asset makes more sense because you generally are being owed, rather than owing someone else. The usual balance for it will be a debit.

It is a little unclear if you are being reimbursed for actual specific expenditures on your part, or if you are simply billing a client to recover their cost. That is, are you spending money on behalf of someone else, as a temporary pass-through, or are these *your* expenses of doing business and you simply want to make sure you charge the client enough to cover them? Or is it both?

The answer to that question would help determine what accounts are used and if Income accounts should be involved.

An example of being your own expense is you travel to a client’s location via air and rental car. Your service fees aren’t priced to cover this, so you bill it separately to the client. This is not a pass-through situation. The expense is yours, so you’d simply book everything on the invoice to an Income account. (you might keep separate income accounts to track them apart from your service fees though)

An example of a pass-through would be, say you fly a client to you for a consultation/training session. You’re fronting the money and you bill it as a separate line item. The expense was the client’s, not yours. (that isn’t a very common transaction of course, but it illustrates the point)

You should also speak to a local CPA concerning that question.

Once you have that answered, we can look at the transactions in order and how to get them recorded in GnuCash.

Regards,
Adrien

> On May 23, 2019, at 12:05 PM, Steven Morrison <slmorrison at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I read available email threads and the manual regarding posting payment for reimbursable expenses, but I'm still not "getting it".
> 
> My account structure is set up with an asset level account called Reimbursables (should this be an Income:Reimbursables account?). I create an invoice that splits fees for Services and Reimbursables (mileage, airfare, etc.) and post the invoice. All of my expenses are charged through a single business credit card. The invoice is handled through a billing service, so when I get paid, I get a check that may pay me for both Services and reimbursements from different invoices, and those accounts and amounts are broken out for me on a statement.
> 
> I pay off the reimbursable charges on the credit card from a business account prior to being reimbursed.  When I deposit the check I process the payment in Gnucash, splitting the payment for Services into Accounts Receivable (this gets posted to my business checking account so that is OK) and payment for reimbursed expenses into the Reimbursables account.  The problem of course, is that this does not account for the fact that these were charged to a credit card that was paid off from the business checking account, so that account never gets credited for the credit card payment.  So I'm missing something here.  Anybody out there willing to clue me in?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> SLM