[GNC] How to balance correctly a particular transaction which involves debt?

[Adrien Monteleone]

Daniel,

I use:

Assets:Current Assets:Reimbursements

I then have category accounts under that for,

Family
Friends
Other

And then individual accounts with each person's name. (I have one for 
each sibling, parent, and several close friends where this happens 
regularly enough to need them) But you could just use one single account 
if you like. The individual account example is nice because you can see 
at a glance how much any one specific person owes you or you owe them, 
without involving the Business Features which would be overkill.

In all of GnuCash, I use the Description field *only* for 'Payee/Payor', 
an old habit from other software, but it serves me well. I use the 
'Notes' field (only visible in Double Line mode) for what many others 
would call 'description'.

Doing so in your case would show the store name in the Description 
field, one of the splits would contain the credit card account, the 
other split would be set to your friend's reimbursable account with you. 
You could alternatively put the store name in the Notes field. Either 
are searchable, and also filterable for a report.

It doesn't involve expense (or income) accounts at all.

In the case of someone owing you, that is an asset. The reverse, you 
owing them, would be a liability. So you could put the reimbursable 
accounts in either part of the tree. I chose assets because others are 
usually owing me, but the reverse does happen occasionally. It is simple 
enough to see that the balance is negative, indicating such a condition.

Finally, it wasn't entirely clear from the initial post, but if you 
*also* bought something at the same store on the same transaction, then 
you of course *would* have one or more splits for your own expenses, but 
then additional split(s) for your loan to your friend.

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Adrien

On 9/21/20 9:25 AM, Daniel Fishman wrote:
> On 9/21/20 5:15 PM, Christopher Lam wrote:
>> I wouldn't add an entry into Expenses:shop -- you didn't exactly spend 
>> your
>> money into this shop.
>>
>> Spending/lending money:
>> Liability:credit card -$50
>> Asset:Friend owes me +$50
>>
>> Recovering funds:
>> Asset:Friend owes me -$50
>> Asset:Cash or bank +$50
> 
> It seems to me that using the
> 
> Liability:credit card -$50
> Asset:Friend owes me +$50
> 
> loses a bit of information, since a credit card statement will list the 
> shop
> as the receiver of the money. It seems to me that by omitting  the shop 
> from
> being mentioned in any of the entries will make it more difficult to 
> correlate
> the credit card statement with an information in gnucash.