[GNC] Registering Off Balance Sheet in GNUCash

[Stan Brown]

On 2023-04-11 07:25, Murugan Muruganandam wrote:
> I wanted to input off balance sheet items in gnucash , contingent asset and contingent liabilities.  any of you have done this with existing account structure?

The easy way is to enter a "transaction" with the amount of the
contingent liability as part of the description or memo field. Simply
leave the debit and credit amounts blank. Or rather than a separate
transaction for the contingency, you could enter it as a split within
the "real" transaction -- again, the key is to put amounts in the memo
field and not in the debit or credit column. Either way, be sure to
include some short string, for ease in finding these transactions later.

Obviously GnuCash will not do any sort of arithmetic on the amount in
the above. If doing arithmetic with them is a priority, then you can
create accounts for the contingencies, but you will need to deselect
those accounts in your regular balance sheet reports. You might also
want to take this approach if you have a lot of contingencies.

If you take the latter approach, you'll also need contingent income and
expense accounts; otherwise your transactions will be unbalanced. So
_those_ accounts will need to be excluded from your profit and loss
reports. Something that would make this easier is to create a top-level
account called Contingencies, with contingent assets, liabilities,
income, and expense under it. That will make it easier to exclude the
contingency accounts.

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