[GNC] Reimbursement in a credit card a/c

[Mahon Finbar]

Yep, on reading your message and on re-examination and some testing of 
various ways of entering it, and actually thinking out the situation 
:-), I got it more or less right.

Thank you so much for the entirely logical explanation, very helpful.

On 04/07/2020 05:42, Tommy Trussell wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 8:36 AM Mahon Finbar <mahon.finbar at neuf.fr 
> <mailto:mahon.finbar at neuf.fr>> wrote:
>
>     I got reimbursed a sum of over €500 on my credit card account.
>
>     It seems to be causing some issues with reconciling the a/c.
>
>     I entered the amount as a 'credit card payment' The reimbursement
>     meant
>     that the a/c was in credit for quite a while :-) but is now back to
>     'normal' i.e. I pay for things and then pay at the end of the month,
>     always, i.e. I don't have a balance unpaid at that moment.
>
>     However, the a/c won't reconcile, even avoiding, as uncleared, the
>     current outstandings.
>
>     Am I doing something wrong?
>
>
> Hi! I can think of a couple of possibilities. Have you been 
> reconciling the credit card account every month, or was this the first 
> time you tried?
>
> If you have been reconciling it every month and this is the first time 
> you've had a problem, I would suspect you entered the statement 
> balance as a positive when it should have been a negative. (So in 
> other words, most of the time when you get a statement, you owe 
> something, let's say €240. But after the credit balance instead of 
> -€260 -- negative two hundred sixty euros.)
>
> Another thing I noticed is that you said "I got reimbursed a sum of 
> over €500 on my credit card account."
>
> When you got reimbursed, you do NOT enter that amount as if you wrote 
> a check to the credit card company -- if you were reimbursed for an 
> expenditure (either you returned an item to a store, or you were 
> reimbursed by a third party for things you bought on your credit card) 
> then you would enter that in the credit card register as a NEGATIVE 
> expenditure. In the register it would appear as a positive number in 
> the same COLUMN as your payments, but its other split account would 
> offset whatever expenditure you are being reimbursed for.
>
> So in your credit card register, if you purchase an appliance, the 
> original transaction might look like:
>
> Store A    Expenses:Household:Appliances  [cr] €500
>
> Then you return the appliance to store A for a full refund:
>
> Store A   Expenses:Household:Appliances [dr] €500
>
> The first transaction increases your credit card liability and the 
> second transaction reduces the credit card liability (in this case, as 
> you described it, below zero because in between the purchase and the 
> return you paid off your credit card bill). SO the next time you 
> reconcile your statement you would need to enter a NEGATIVE number in 
> the starting balance.
>
> If you had been reimbursed using a different form of payment (such as 
> a check or bank draft) then you would have entered it similarly into 
> THAT bank account, as a negative expenditure with the positive part of 
> the money going into the bank account.
>
> If you need some more guidance, have a look at the GnuCash 
> documentation, especially section 2.9 of Chapter 2.
>
> https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v4/C/gnucash-guide/chapter_txns.html
>
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