I'm fairly new to GnuCash and this kind of accounting. I'm trying to work out how to receive gift money as cash and spend it via a credit card.
I've also started looking at reports so I can see how I'm fairing month-to-month and I'm thinking the Cash Flow report shows pretty well what I want (although I've added in Liabilities:CreditCard
so I see those actual transactions rather than just the monthly credit card bill). I don't think I really want to see anything involving gift money on this report since it isn't really part of my normal money/spending and it might not be spent straight away, so cleaner just to not show it rather than it look like I had a really good month when it's my birthday and a really bad month when I spend it?
How should I go about this kind of scenario?
My Current Thinking
For example, let's say I've received £100 cash as a gift. I pay this into my main bank account. I want to spend £75 of it on something, but it needs to be paid by credit card (I'll keep the remainder for the time being). At the end of the month, there is a transaction from my main bank account to my credit card to pay off the balance (let's say £200 total), £75 of which is this gift money.
I'm think the transactions I need to record would look something like:
Pay gift money into the bank, putting it in a sub-account:
- £100 from
Income:Gift
toAssets:BankAccount:Gift
Buy things with the credit card, including something with gift money:
- £125 from
Liabilities:CreditCard
toExpenses:OtherStuff
- £75 from
Liabilities:CreditCard:Gift
toExpenses:Gift
Pay the credit card bill (£200), but modify it to include a split for the gift money:
- £125 from
Assets:BankAccount
toLiabilities:CreditCard
- £75 from
Assets:BankAccount:Gift
toLiabilities:CreditCard:Gift
The Gift sub-accounts should eventually have 0 balance once all the gift money has been spent and credit card bills paid.
As for the Cash Flow report, I'm thinking I just need to exclude the Assets:BankAccount:Gift
and Liabilities:CreditCard:Gift
accounts? This should effectively hide all those gift transactions?
Does any of this sound reasonable? Am I missing a better way of doing things? (I suspect I'm over-complicating things...)
Update (19 Jul)
A common theme of the replies so far seems to be suggesting that my approach is perhaps worth reconsidering.
My original thinking was, if we're having a conversation about how much we earnt/spent last month, "gift money" wouldn't be part of that conversation (since that's much more personal/discretionary/for special treats, etc, than "normal" money) and so I was thinking of keeping it out of the reports. In terms of "how did we do last month?", it would be irrelevant if someone had received/spent gift money.
Liabilities:CreditCard:Gift
instead of justLiabilities:CreditCard
? I understand why an assetsGift
subaccount exists, butLiabilities:CreditCard
seems like too much added complexity.Liabilities:CreditCard:Gift
was to provide a mechanism to exclude those transactions from reports