GnuCash to track expenses when refunds occur

Question

I've started using GnuCash to keep track of my expenses so that I have an idea of how much I spend each month for food, clothing, etc. My main goal is to be able to see if I went out of budget one month in say clothing so I can compensate the next month. What I would like to know and could not find help with is - for example, I bought clothes online and on purpose bought different sizes of the same dress. I then returned all dresses except for the one I decided to keep. On my credit card this shows as 2 operations - one of say $200 spent which I labeled as spent on clothing, and another with the refund of $150. So I truly only spent $50 on clothing. However on my budget report it will show as me spending $200 - so it will give me an overestimation of how much I spent. How can I tell gnucash that the $150 refund is linked to the $200 spending and so only $50 should go to expenses-clothing?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Congrats on taking control of your finances and creating a budget! The easiest way to handle this is by entering in a new entry for the return, and instead of entering a charge for the account, you use the payment column. (And by the way, in GnuCash, if you put a negative value into the charge field, it will automatically move it to a positive value in the payment field for you.) Here's an example screenshot of a purchase at Target with a partial return a week later:

In your case your "charge" column amount would be $200 and the "payment" column a week later would be $150.