[GNC] Please suggest approach to track a category of disbursements

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Wed Oct 2 12:05:48 EDT 2019


Sorry, my comment skipped over option 1. My point was, I think that was the correct method:

Dr. Taxable Fund 	$80
Dr. Exp:Tax		$20
	Cr. IRA			$100

Could you describe in more detail what info you want to see? That is, are there certain totals or balances you want to track?

What you are doing above can show you how much went from one account (the IRA) to another account. (or multiple accounts)

This can be done with a Transaction Report or a Cash Flow Report. (which is misnamed, but does this particular job)

Since you mentioned tracking 20+ taxable funds, David and I mentioned possibly creating a single placeholder account and then put those individual funds as their own accounts as children of the placeholder —e.g.,

Assets:Investments:Taxable Funds
Assets:Investments:Taxable Funds:Fund A
Assets:Investments:Taxable Funds:Fund B
Assets:Investments:Taxable Funds:Fund C
Assets:Investments:Taxable Funds:Fund etc.

If you and your wife both invest in the same fund individually and you want to track that separately, you could ’tag’ each transaction with your names somewhere and filter reports based on that info. (see below) You could also create an intermediary placeholder for you and your wife, but I don’t think that is necessary and might get messy. But do what works for you. You might even leave out the ’Taxable Funds’ example above and just put the individual funds under ‘Investments’.

This would allow you to see all of the accounts aggregated if you wanted in a report, (or the CoA tab) or individually as desired. (or any mix of them since you can select individual accounts for a report)

The Transaction Report is likely the better vehicle here because it allows for filtering against accounts as well as filtering on info such as Description, Notes, or Memos of individual splits. This way, you could enter more detailed info there and run a report to see totals/balances based on that info. (what that info might be is up to you)

Get a handle on how you want to structure your account tree to track all of these funds, and then try a Transaction Report including only those accounts. Play with the options a bit to see how they work. Then feel free to come back with more questions on tweaking that. I too found the Report documentation a bit rough at first. I learned the most by running the reports and tweaking options.

Regards,
Adrien



> On Oct 2, 2019 w40d275, at 9:40 AM, <ornd25 at tutanota.com> <ornd25 at tutanota.com> wrote:
> 
> Adrien, thanks for responding. I hope I have some misconceptions that can be easily rectified but a belief in a limited number of splits isn’t one of them.
> 
> In order for my notional “Disbursements” account to work the full disbursement before taxes must be debited fully in Disbursements pre-tax in a single transaction (or so I believe). Once it’s there, I have no choice but to do the tax split from Disbursements (again, so I believe) in a second transaction. Those two transactions then led me to the abstraction, confusion, and self-zeroing problems I mentioned in the OP.
> 
> I’m not sure what you mean about making child accounts under disbursements - Exp:Income Tax is already an account.
> 
> If I have misunderstood you, please tell me.
> 




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