[GNC] How to record accrued interest

Mattia Rizzolo mattia at mapreri.org
Thu Dec 2 13:59:11 EST 2021


Hi!

I'd like a suggestion on how to best record accrued interest from my
checking accounts.

(please consider I'm in Europe, so interest is *low* heh).

Banks here calculate interest in various periods of competence (that I'd
like to record in gnucash), but it normally becomes eligible once a year
(at least for people, positive interest is normally credited onto the
account with a value date of 1st of January, negative interest is
charged on the 31st of March).

So, here is an example of "positive interest" that a bank owes to me.
Here is what I did:

                                                    Dr.     Cr.
2021-06-30  Expenses:Taxes:CapitalGain:Bank1        0.01
            Assets:AccountsReceivable:EUR           0.02
            Income:InterestIncome:Checking                  0.03
2021-09-30  Expenses:Taxes:CapitalGain:Bank1        0.02
            Assets:AccountsReceivable:EUR           0.06
            Income:InterestIncome:Checking                  0.08


My plan is to credit AR and debit the actual Assets:Banks:Bank1 account
of whatever it's going to come to by the end of the year.

Is this the proper way to do it?

Now, the documentation says that I should avoid directly using the AR
account by myself, bypassing the business' customer features, otoh it
feels silly to record my bank as a "customer" and issue an invoice for
interest I'm owed :3

Should I just create a random "asset" account for all of the ARs that
I'm going to manually track?  Would it be fine to create it as a
subaccount of the main Assets:AccountsReceivable hierarchy, perhaps
still of type "A/R"?



Likewise, I actually have the same situation with negative interest that
I owe to another bank where I operate with a negative balance: I have a
monthly report of how much interest I accrued, which I'll have to pay
next year, so I'd like to set this up under Liabilities:A/P (even more
important because clearly the numbers are a tad higher than the example
above u.U), but I guess it's the same thing as above, so just referring
to that ought to be fine.


Thank you for your guidance! :)

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-


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