Hey, I'm trying to figure out a good simple strategy that allows me to track expenses that I share with my girlfriend. We live together and we have two types of shared expenses: the ones for our apartment like rent and utilities and the ones where usually I pay for something for the both of us.
For the first type of transactions I don't care about the balance between us, she pays a fixed amount into my account from which most bills go out from each month. I do however care about having accurate tracking of these expenses so I can tell what our fixed monthly expenses are. For example, I want the full rent and cost of all the utilities to show up among my expenses. At the moment I'm tracking this using regular expense accounts which I create posts against whenever I pay our rent for example. I post the transactions where my girlfriend sends me the fixed amount as a special income account and I'm pretty happy with this solution (I think). I currently have no solution that I'm happy with for the second type of transactions. These transactions usually occur at an irregular basis and the amounts vary wildly and I always care about maintaining some sort of balance but whether I care about tracking the full value to an expense account or not varies. For example, if I pay for a pair of shoes she wants because she doesn't have any money in the currency then I'd want to keep track of the balance she owes me but not the expense. However if we go and buy Christmas decorations and I pay then I'd want to record the full amount to an expense account and half of the amount to an account that represents the money my girlfriend owes me. Preferably I'd like to track the balance between me and my girlfriend as an asset account as that to me seems like the quickest way to at a glance tell the status between us (but I may be wrong). I was playing around with using an intermediate liability account (see bellow) and I think I could calculate the balance between us with a query but since we already have a history and I just started using beancount I have no account to post the current balance against and future payments to balance this would be harder to track without an asset account? 2017-11-26 * "Christmas" Expenses:Home:Decoration 30 GBP Liabilities:Shared -30 GBP 2017-11-26 * "Christmas" Liabilities:Shared 30 GBP Liabilities:Amex -30 GBP Does anyone have any idea on how to track this in a neat way, preferably without plugins. And yes I've read the expense sharing cookbok but didn't see any solution I was perfectly happy with :). Cheers! Andreas -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to beancount@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/4b167c55-e651-4d93-a2a1-cebd41813a59%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
