Recording claimable expenses in GnuCash

Question

I am new to accounting and trying to learn a few things as my accounts get more and more complicated. I currently use GnuCash to record simple income/expenses/assets/liabilities and have had a new situation I don't know how to record.

I am currently billing some expenses for work and for my kayak club to my personal credit card. Under normal circumstances I would do the following (my +/- may be backwards):

Expense +$100 Credit Card -$100

and then when the credit card bill comes I would pay it off

Credit Card +$100 Chequing Account -$100

For expenses that I get reimbursements for I would like to be able to note that I paid for the expense with my credit card and that I paid off my credit card with my chequing account.

At the same time, I would like to be able to create another parent account (maybe "claimable expenses") that shows that I purchased the item, and was then reimbursed so that an individual expense for work or my club has a zero balance.

I tried to look this up in previous threads but didn't quite understand how to apply this to my situation Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

When you spend $100 on kayak supplies, you have lost $100 worth of assets (or incurred $100 worth of liabilities if you borrowed the money), but you have gained another $100 asset: the right to be paid $100 as reimbursement. So this really should be a transfer to an asset account.

I handle this for myself by making a top-level Asset account named Reimbursable, with sub-accounts for different projects, organizations, etc. So you could make one called Reimbursable:Kayak Club. When you spend $100 from your credit card on kayak supplies, make a transaction that charges (i.e. credits, or adds) $100 to Credit Card and debits (adds) $100 to Reimbursable:Kayak Club. When you receive $100 in reimbursement and deposit it in your bank account, make a transaction that credits (subtracts) $100 from Reimbursable:Kayak Club and debits (adds) $100 to Bank Account.

The balance in Reimbursable:Kayak Club represents the amount of reimbursement you have coming to you. Once everything is settled, Reimbursable:Kayak Club should have a balance of 0.