On 12/06/17 12:44, adrian wrote:
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
Hmmmm. Seems to me that you received a $70.00 gift along with the card.
nvsoar
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