There may be technical accounting reasons to treat rebates as offsets to expenses rather than income. But my own reasons are simply that it's what makes sense to me. I don't really track income very carefully. I mainly track expenses.
A rebate is a complex form of discount where the vendor is trying to limit your ability to use the discount (one time only) and they are hoping you won't remember to send it in. If I went to the store and saw a computer on sale as original price $1000, marked down to $900 I would never dream of entering that as a $1000 purchase and a $100 income. A rebate is conceptually identical to me: it is a delayed discount on my purchase, and in my head if there is a $100 rebate I'm thinking "this thing costs $900," not "this costs $1000 but the expense will be offset by my higher income when I get the rebate". So for that reason, it seems like the obvious thing is to treat the rebate as an offset to the original expense. In the case at hand I spent $430 on the gift card and when I buy something that costs $100, I'm really only spending $86. That's what makes sense to me for how this ought to be counted. Since I don't know the category of the expense in advance, I can't just put in a $70 offset unless I put it as "misc", in which case I lose track of some information about how I allocated my money. So does anybody have advice on how to solve my original problem? -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
