Tommy Trussell wrote >> Adrian: >> 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. >> > > I went back to your original question (remember that this is NOT a forum > -- > it's an email list that you're viewing through Nabble)
Yeah, despite that I have been unable to actually subscribe to the list. But your point was you wanted more context, I suppose. >>I bought a $500 gift card for $430 this week. I would like to add this to >> gnucash as some kind of asset so that as I spend it, the correctly scaled >> amount gets transferred to the expense account I use. In other words, if >> I >> spend $100 from this account it's really only $86. >> >> I tried to do this by creating a security fund and then using the price >> editor to set the price to 0.86. But when I insert a transaction from >> the >> new account to an expense account, it doesn't apply the 0.86 factor. >> What >> is the right way to do what I want to do? > > > I think you have demonstrated the difficulty with what you're trying to > do-- you're trying to make a rebate card a different KIND of currency, > which in one sense, it is. HOWEVER every time you make a purchase from > that > card it will require a currency exchange, which adds a level of complexity > and may not produce the result you want. > > I'm sure you could make it work, but in the end, it's a lot easier to just > offset the $70 against the expenses. TECHNICALLY you don't get benefit of > the full amount you spent on the card until you have completely depleted > the value of the card, but that would be a PITA (sorry for the acronym -- > I > mean "difficult"). > > I think the real answer is to go back and think about what it is you want > to achieve. I'm not sure what exactly is unclear. I am thinking of the acquisition of this card not as a purchase, but as a shift of assets from one form to another. So instead of $430 in the bank I now have a different asset, namely $500 on the card. Yes, it's true, I don't benefit until I spend the money. But the same is true of money in the bank. But it's not really $500 on the card because I only spent $430 on it. It is exactly like a currency exchange, though it's not obvious to me why this means my goal is a very complex one. It seems pretty simple to have an exchange rate and have the card denominated in some currency, say the Gifta, that is equal to .86 dollars. When I buy something using the card I can go to the card's account and list the expenses in Giftas and they will be automatically translated by the 0.86 factor. (I assume that if I made an account denominated in, say GBP, that I would be able to get that to translate to the USD that I use for my regular accounts; after all, this is something that is important to many people.) Now actually I realized that the solution I was fiddling with can be made to work. As I mentioned before, I made an account and created a security and tried to set its price using the price editor. For some reason the Price Editor doesn't seem to do anything, but there is a column labeled "Price" in the account I made, and if I set this to 0.86 (which I have to do manually for every transaction, it seems) then things work as I was hoping. (And I notice that prices I enter in the ledger appear in the price editor even though the reverse doesn't seem to be the case.) It would be even nicer if I could set the price once and have that same price stay in effect until I change it, rather than having to enter it again for each transaction with the default price being "1". Why do I care? It's just so that my accounting correctly tracks my expenditures in different categories. I don't need to use accounting software to do price comparisons, but if I want to know how much I spent on Widgets this year---and I buy some using the card---the number will be inflated if I don't account for the discount. -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org 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.