On 4 May 2018 at 09:05, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepf...@dialup4less.com > wrote:
> On 5/4/2018 4:13 AM, Gio Bacareza wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> My partner and I are moving in together and we'd like to share expenses >> like groceries, rent, etc. So we'd like to track expenses as well as our >> appropriate contributions to make sure that we both are contributing >> equally to house expenses. >> >> How should I set up the contribution? Under what main account type should >> it be? Any recommendations? >> >> I am going to suggest something more straight forward than treating > contributions as "income", less distorting to what the situation is. > Imagine that this were an ordinary (business) partnership, income, > expenses, and partner's "drawings" or "contributions" (partner's drawing > accounts are under equity, representing each partner's investment in the > enterprise). In other words, you can look in a standard accounting text > under "accounting for partnerships". > This doesn't sound straightforward at all. What's complicated about treating joint contributions to the household coffers as "income" to the household? Treating that income as ever-increasing equity would confuse P&L and cashflow calculations, wouldn't it? > OK, this is a special sort of partnership that only has expenses, no > income. So the drawing account of each partner will only show > contributions. Going to be very easy to see if the total contributions are > equal or not. > > In other words, a funny set of books, in effect just "expenses" and > "equity" trees with meaningful content. You can leave the top level parents > "assets", "income", and "liabilities" in there, but usually these would > have no contents. Or perhaps because of how you run your household, they > might. For example, could be a "cookie jar" for small amounts of cash held > on hand, so something under assets. Or there might be a situation where one > partner pays a large bill but that partner's contributions are already > higher. So treat that as a loan to the partnership and now something under > "liabilities" > It seems to me that a household is just as likely to have liabilities and assets. In our case, there are credit cards, the mortgage, and the house. There might also be a car, or any number of other assets jointly owned. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
