[GNC] help in setting up payment plan

[Adrien Monteleone]

Since this is discussing a Liability, the term is "Accounts Payable" in 
each case rather than "Accounts Receivable" but that is how I'd do it too.

However, there is a complication using the Business Features if you are 
making payments to a single entity with different service providers. 
GnuCash can't do that out of the box. There are two options I can think 
of to accomplish this:

1. Use an intermediary asset account as the source of funds — transfer 
funds from say Bank to Holding/Clearing and then use the 
Holding/Clearing account to 'pay' the individual invoices. You can't 
track statements from the higher entity though.

2. Post the individual service provider bills under each their own 
Vendor in GnuCash, book them against your various Expenses:Medical 
accounts to an Accrued Liabilities account. (can be sub-account of 
Liabilities:Accounts Payable, which makes for a nice roll-up total and 
not having to do outside math) When you get the statement from the 
hospital, 'pay' the individual vendor bills by booking a bill for the 
hospital between Accrued Liabilities and Accounts Payable. Then actually 
pay the hospital statement/bill as normal.

3. Optionally, same as #2, but handle the individual service provider 
charges manually between separate expense accounts and Accrued 
Liabilities, without creating a Vendor for each one, or raising bills 
for them, then proceed as above booking and paying the hospital.

Personally, I'd go for the second option as it models the real-world 
more accurately. It also allows you to run individual reports for each 
service provider if you want, without separate expense accounts for each 
one. (and instead, you can have separate expense accounts for each type 
of medical expense, say Procedures, Consultations, Medications, etc.)

If you choose option #3, you'd need to craft a special Transaction 
Report to see Service Provider detail. Of course, the level of detail 
you can report on is limited to what you put into GnuCash. I always 
enter every line item as its own split and never combine anything. I 
also choose to *not* 'accumulate splits on post' so that every line item 
shows up as a separate split in my registers. This allows me to craft 
such detailed Account & Transaction reports if needed. This is the only 
way to get line-item detail from a bill/invoice into the registers for 
reporting as there is no other way to access it outside of viewing 
individual bills/invoices.

Regards,
Adrien

On 11/7/25 1:56 PM, David Cousens wrote:
> Alternatively you could use the Business features of GnuCash and create
> each provider as a vendor and have a single Medical Expenses account.
> Here when you receive a service, you would raise an invoice. this
> automatically credits a Liability account "Accounts Receivable" and you
> would specify the Medical Expenses account as the account to debit.
> 
> Here when you make a payment, you would credit your Bank account  and
> debit the "Accounts Receivable".
> 
> If you are only using the business features to record the expenses
> incurred on the payment plan then the balance of the "Accounts
> Receivable" is what you owe the plan at any time.