[GNC] How to record accrued interest

[Stan Brown]

Ciao Mattia,

I think you have done it exactly right!(*) Here interest is paid
monthly, as it's accrued, so I don't have your exact issue. But banks
often give rebates on credit-card purchases, and I record those the same
way you are recording interest.

One suggestion: Rather than AccountsReceivable:EUR, you might think
about AccountsReceivable:Bank1. That way if you are owed money by some
other bank, or a refund from a taxing authority, you could put that into
AccountsReceivable:{name of other agency}.

(*) The usual disclaimer: I'm in the US, and I don't know anything about
European regulations that may exist for accounting. However, since this
is for your personal use, I don't think those regulations would matter
anyway.

-- 
Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com

On 2021-12-02 10:59, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> 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! :)
>