[GNC] Accounting for a pre-paid electronic toll card

[Kevin Reid]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 8:54 AM Tony Vanson <tonyvans70 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here one needs to obtain an electronic card and, once done, must be
> charged with a cash value prior to travelling and topped up with cash on a
> regular basis.
> My question is what category is this card and how do I treat additions and
> subtractions from it?
> I initially thought it might be treated as a credit card but the way it
> operates it's obviously not.


It's an asset — something you have of value — that is measured in dollars.
So, create an Asset account for it. When you top it up, you move money from
your cash account to the toll card account. When you use it to pay tolls,
move money from the toll card account to Expenses:Transportation:Tolls or
whatever expense category makes sense for you.

In my own case I have a category under Assets just for all these restricted
assets that can only be spent on certain things, but that categorization is
up to you.

By the way: The only difference between the way you use this and the way
you use a credit card account is that the payments come before the usage
rather than after. If you were to change GnuCash's setting for “Reverse
balanced accounts” to “None”, then all account types would work the same
way, so that your credit card account would appear as having a negative
balance — because it's a liability, an opposite-of-value to you.