[GNC] How to track part of the total available assets spanning several accounts?

[Adrien Monteleone]

As David noted, this sounds like a budgeting question.

GnuCash has a budget module, and it may serve your needs.

If you still really want to track total funds available for certain purposes, you could employ special accounts like your Equity example.

Accounts in GnuCash generally are to model the real world. But you can also create virtual accounts for your own purposes.

The structure of Assets you gave an example of has all real-world accounts.

You could create something like this:

Equity
-Budgeting
  Operational
  Surplus


Now, each time you make a transaction involving the real-world asset accounts that hold your funds, you make either extra budgeting transactions, or extra splits for budgeting, keeping everything together.

If you add money to a real-world account, you’ll also do the following:

Dr. Equity:Budgeting
Cr. Equity:Budgeting:Operational


When you spend money out of those real-world accounts, you’ll enter the reverse:

Dr. Equity:Budgeting:Operational
Cr. Equity:Budgeting


Periodically, run a P&L (Income Statement) to see how much net profit you have for deciding how much to add to Surplus, then enter this:

Dr. Equity:Budgeting:Operational
Cr. Equity:Budgeting:Surplus


(If I’m understanding correctly how you are moving funds around)

With this method, Equity never changes because the Budgeting sub-accounts balance out the parent Budgeting account.

You also never affect your real-world transactions as they still contain the splits they would have otherwise. You’re just making extra transactions for budgeting purposes.


Note too, you don’t have to close report tabs. You can keep a P&L tab open at all times, and simply refresh as needed.

If you want to make regular adjustments to Surplus, you can create a Scheduled Transaction that does so, but instead of an amount, use a variable. When the transaction fires, it will ask you for the value of the variable. So you might set the variable to be ’net_profit’ and the transaction might be ’net_profit*0.20’. When the transaction fires, you enter the Net Profit from your P&L, and the transaction will be entered as 20% of that amount.

Regards,
Adrien

> On May 31, 2020 w23d152, at 5:43 PM, Peter Azmanov <peter.azmanov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> New user here. After reading tutorial and searching the web I nearly figured out my accounts layout except one problem.
> 
> Assume the following accounts structure (partial):
> 
> Assets
>  - Cash
>  - Bank 1
>      Account 1
>      Savings 1
>  - Bank 2
>      Account 2
>      Savings 2
>  - Bank 3
>      Account 3
>      Savings 3
> 
> In my mind I divide total available assets into three parts: savings, operational money and surplus money (the amount of money that I can spend on extra or non-essential expenses).
> 
> While the first part (savings) can be easily tracked via accounts of this type, the second and third part aren't that obvious. I can't make a sub-account in any of the accounts above because surplus is in all of the accounts and I don't care how it's split between those.
> 
> Before migrating to GNUCash I used to have a separate text file where I tracked surplus money and manually increased this amount by some part of profits left after transfering to savings.
> 
> I want to track this surplus amount somehow along normal account tracking.
> 
> First attempt. I thought about making special equity account "Extra", I can increase/decrease this equity via transactions from income/expense accounts. This is equivalent to partially closing books each month so everything is balanced. But it's not really a solution because I will see decreased income and expenses. Maybe this can be fixed by making appropriate report? This will further complicate things.
> 
> Second attempt. Create two dummy assets with the amount of the surplus with different signs. Any change of the surplus will be reflected in the transfer between these accounts. They will always have the same amount of money but with different signs. This solution isn't very elegant to say the least.
> 
> Is there an appropriate solution for the problem? Maybe I'm wrong in having this problem at all?
> 
> Best regards,
> Peter