Richard, Rich Shepherd's approach is aprt of the way to accounting for a loan made but one would not usually use the business features for doing this. When you borrow money the loan is setup as a liability account as you are obligated to pay it back. Where you make a loan it will be setup as an asset. You will need to create an appropriate loan account depending upon the term of the loan. If it is short term and to be repaid within an accounting year you would set it upunder current assets otherwise you can use a general asset account. E.g.
Asset:Loan Normally when accounting for a loan you need to know what the principal originally was, what interest has accumulated on the loan, what repayments of the principal have been made and what the current outstanding value of the loan is. This can be achieved by creating a number of subaccounts to the above account as follows with the Asset:Loan account as a placeholder account only. Asset:Loan Asset:Loan:Principal Asset:Loan:Accumulated interest Asset:Loan:Repayments When you make the loan, you credit (withdraw from) an appropriate bank account and debit the Asset:Loan:Principal account by the same amount. When you add interest to the loan amount, you debit the Asset:Loan:Accumulated interest account and credit an appropriate Income:Interest account. When the creditor makes a payment to you, you credit the Asset:Loan:Repayments account and debit an appropriate bank account for the payment loan. The total displayed by the placeholder account will be the outstanding loan amount. If the transactions are regular you can use the scheduled transaction editor. Where values change , e.g. interest the amount of the scheduled transaction can be edited to the correct value. See https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v3/C/gnucash-help/setup-accounts.html for deatils of creating and editing accounts. David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] 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.
