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

ornd25 at tutanota.com ornd25 at tutanota.com
Thu Oct 3 08:03:50 EDT 2019



> 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
>
I want to be able to track all disbursements from IRA/tax-benefited funds and accept David's and your recommendation that I use Reports to do this rather than an intermediate account. I'm tracking only six funds plus some associated cash funds and some CDs, but rather than the simple account tree you and he mention with tags, I nested them deeply. "Investments" account has three children, tax-free Roth, tax-benefited IRA, and taxable. Each of those accounts is split between my wife and me, and that leads to the 20+ number that I track. That part works okay, but apparently does yield some difficulties in tracking disbursements from those two particular branches.

I'll look into changing this but initially I'll spend some time learning the Report system. In that regard I did locate the Options button in the menu bar and that definitely helps my learning process. The Tutorial and Concepts Guide was more useful to me as a beginner than the Help Guide. I have some questions about that but I'll ask those in a separate question.

Thanks. We can call this question complete.


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