Show liability payments with expenses?

Question

In GnuCash Liabilities are separate from expenses, which makes sense. However, this makes it difficult to get a useful budget report or expenditure report since it does not include my largest outgo, my mortgage. Is there a way to include my liabilities with my expenses in the reports?

Answer 1

I'm not sure you're using this right. "Liability" is your mortgage balance. "Expense" is your mortgage payment. Each mortgage payment is a split expense: one portion goes to the "Mortgage Interest Expense" account, and the other goes to "Mortgage" liability account reducing the balance.

On your reports you see the decrease in the mortgage liability and the increase in the interest expense, the sum of which gives you the total mortgage payment.

Answer 2

I had the same problem. I like the presentation of the Income & Expense chart but because the non-interest parts of my mortgage payments are not an expense, its usefulness for budgeting is impaired. What I want is a cash flow chart that looks just like the Income & Expense chart but shows cash flow and I don't think this exists.

My work-around is to create two income accounts for my salary. Every time I am paid I create a split transaction where the part of my salary equal to my mortgage payment that month comes from an account called Income:Salary for mortgage and the rest of my salary comes from Income:Salary for expenses.

Then I can just de-select the Income:Salary for mortgage account from the report options and get the view I want.

However I would love for someone to tell me the correct way to get the view I want. I suspect one of the budget reports will do it but I am suffering from Bug 638971 and the budget interface seems fiddly.