[GNC] accounts setup (how to duplicate same payment in two expense accounts)

[Peter West]

How would this work?

Set up an expense account for Vacation expenses.

Set up other expense accounts for
Vacation fuel
Vacation accommodation
Vacation flights
Vacation entertainment
etc

Note that these are also expense accounts.

Enter your fuel, say $50, normally against your cash/cheque/credit card account and, say, Vehicle expenses. These will be matching Cr and Dr entries.

Then enter $50 against Vacation expenses (cr, I think?), and enter negative $50 (also cr) against Vacation fuel. These will zero out, but the Vacation expenses account will still show how much you spent on your vacation, and the Vacation fuel account will show a negative amount for your vacation fuel expenses.

Peter
--
Peter West
pbw at pbw.id.au
“The greatest among you shall be your servant.”

> On 28 Jan 2020, at 9:15 pm, Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2020-01-27 08:28, malam via gnucash-user wrote:
>> In a particular case, I would like to assign a simple payment to two
>> different expense categories (both 100%, not splitting the payment).
>> 
>> For example: During the vacation I spend 50$ on gasoline. This goes
>> from my cash account to car expenses. At the end of the year GC shows
>> total car expenses. This works as expected. But at the same time I
>> would like to have the data of total expenses for the vacations.
> Think about this for a minute. If you do this, then when you total up
> your expense categories it will be $50 higher than the actual total
> because that $50 for vacation gasoline got counted twice.
> 
> My own practice is to count gasoline bought on vacation as a vacation
> expense. You could decide it the other way, but I'm pretty sure that you
> can't do count it as both, because you shouldn't.
> 
> One option, which I don't recommend, would be to have a separate
> account, "Vacation Gasoline". Then your present Gasoline account would
> become a mere placeholder, with Vacation Gasoline and Non-Vacation
> Gasoline under it so that your reports would automatically compute the
> total gasoline. You could then manually add Vacation Gasoline and
> Vacation to find out how much your vacation cost.
> 
> Another option, which I also don't recommend, is to use the SQL backend
> and run queries to pull information from a single entry into two categories.
> 
> Personally, I think both are awfully over-complicated, especially given
> that the amount of money spent on gasoline during vacation is probably a
> small part of the expense of the vacation and probably a small part of
> the annual expense of gasoline.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Stan Brown
> Tompkins County, New York, USA
> https://BrownMath.com
> http://OakRoadSystems.com
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