“Business day” and “due date” for bills
I don't believe Saturday is a business day either. When I deposit a check at a bank's drive-in after 4pm Friday, the receipt tells me it will credit as if I deposited on Monday.  If a business' computer doesn't adjust their billing to have a weekday due date, they are supposed to accept the payment on the next business day, else, as you discovered, a Sunday due date is really the prior Friday. In which case they may be running afoul of the rules that require X number of days from the time they mail a bill to the time it's due.  The flip side to all of this, is to pick and choose your battles in life. Just pay the bill 2 days early. The interest on a few hundred dollars is a few cents per week. You save that by not using a stamp, just charge it on their site on the Friday. Keep in mind, you can be right, but their computer still dings you. So you call and spend your valuable time when ever the due date is over a weekend, getting an agent to reverse the late fee. The cost of 'right' is wasting ten minutes, which is worth far more than just avoiding the issue altogether.  But - if you are in the US (you didn't give your country), we have regulations for everything. HR 627, aka The CARD act of 2009, offers - ‘‘(2) WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY DUE DATES.—If the payment due date for a   credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan is a day on   which the creditor does not receive or accept payments by mail   (including weekends and holidays), the creditor may not treat a   payment received on the next business day as late for any purpose.’’. So, if you really want to pursue this, you have the power of our illustrious congress on your side. You definitely have an argument for getting them to reverse the late fee, especially if it hasn't happened very often. (If you are late every month they may be less likely to forgive.) As for why this happens, it's not actually about business days, but instead it's based on when they know that you paid. In general, there are 2 ways for a company to mark a bill as paid: Late Fees: Some systems automatically assign late fees at the start of the day after the due date if money has not been received. In your case, if your bill was due on the 24th, the late fee was probably assessed at midnight of the 25th, and the payment arrived after that during the day of the 25th. You may have been able to initiate the payment on the company's website at 11:59pm on the 24th and not have received a late fee (or whatever their cutoff time is). Suggestion: as a rule of thumb, for utility bills whose due date and amount can vary slightly from month to month, you're usually better off setting up your payments on the company website to pull from your bank account, instead of setting up your bank account to push the payment to the company. This will ensure that you always get the bill paid on time and for the correct amount. If you still would rather push the payment from your bank account, then consider setting up the payment to arrive about 5 days early, to account for holidays and weekends. It's likely that your bill always shows the 24th as the due date. Their system is programmed to maintain that consistency regardless of the day of the week that falls on. When the 24th isn't a business day it is good to error on the side of caution and use the business day prior.  It would have accepted using their system with a CC payment on the 24th because that goes through their automated system. I would hazard a guess that because your payment was submitted through your bank and arrived on the 23rd it wasn't credited because a live person would have needed to be there to do it and their live people probably don't work weekends. I do much of my bill paying online and have found it easiest to just build a couple days of fluff into the schedule to avoid problems like this. That said, if you call them and explain the situation it is likely that they will credit the late charge back to you.
In the US there is no set date. If all goes well there are multiple dates of importance. If it doesn't go well the budget process also may include continuing resolutions, shutdowns, and sequestrations. I'm not familiar with Gnucash, but I can discuss double-entry bookkeeping in general. I think the typical solution to something like this is to create an Asset account for what this other person owes you. This represents the money that he owes you. It's an Accounts Receivable. Method 1: Do you have/need separate accounts for each company that you are paying for this person? Do you need to record where the money is going? If not, then all you need is: When you pay a bill, you credit (subtract from) Checking and debit (add to) Friend Account. When he pays you, you credit (subtract from) Friend Account and debit (add to) Checking. That is, when you pay a bill for your friend you are turning one asset, cash, into a different kind of asset, receivable. When he pays you, you are doing the reverse. There's no need to create a new account each time you pay a bill. Just keep a rolling balance on this My Friend account. It's like a credit card: you don't get a new card each time you make a purchase, you just add to the balance. When you make a payment, you subtract from the balance. Method 2: If you need to record where the money is going, then you'd have to create accounts for each of the companies that you pay bills to. These would be Expense accounts.  Then you'd need to create two accounts for your friend: An Asset account for the money he owes you, and an Income account for the stream of money coming in. So when you pay a bill, you'd credit Checking, debit My Friend Owes Me, credit the company expense account, and debit the Money from My Friend income account.  When he repays you, you'd credit My Friend Owes Me and debit Checking. You don't change the income or expense accounts. Method 3: You could enter bills when they're received as a liability and then eliminate the liability when you pay them. This is probably more work than you want to go to. Maybe it's just because of the foundation date. If I start a company on August 1st, I would like its FY starts on that date too, in order to track my first whole year. Would be quite useless to finish my year on December, after just five months. I want to have data of my first year after a twelve months activity. it means that 20% of my closing balance each day will be added up over the course of a month and then given once the month is over. Yes apart from the typo 0.20% of every day balance. The rate itself is quoted for a year, so for a day it will be (Px0.20)/(100x365). Where P = The principal amount of every day. The credits will be every month-end. For leap year will be 366. Check with your Bank quite a few Banks still use the old convention of 360 days in year. In addition to the company-specific annual business cycle reasons and company-specific historical reasons mentioned in the other answers, there is another reason. Accounting firms tend to be very busy during January (and February and March) when most companies are closing and auditing their calendar-year books.  If a company chooses its fiscal year to end at a different time of year, the accounting firms are more available, and the auditing costs might be lower. "Trying to figure out how much money you have available each day sounds like you're making this more complicated than it needs to be. Unless you're extremely tight and you're trying to squeeze by day by day, asking ""do I have enough cash to buy food for today?"" and so on, you're doing too much work. Here's what I do. I make a list of all my bills. Some are a fixed amount every month, like the mortgage and insurance premiums. Others are variable, like electric and heating bills, but still pretty predictable.  Most bills are monthly, but I have a few that come less frequently, like water bills in my area come every 3 months and I have to pay property taxes twice a year. For these you have to calculate how much they cost each month. Like for the water bill, it's once every 3 months so I divide a typical bill by 3. Always round up or estimate a little high to be safe. Groceries are a little tricky because I don't buy groceries on any regular schedule, and sometimes I buy a whole bunch at once and other times just a few things. When groceries were a bigger share of my income, I kept track of what I spent for a couple of months to figure out an average per month. (Today I'm a little richer and I just think of groceries as coming from my spending money.) I allocate a percentage of my income for contributions to church and charities and count this just like bills. It's a good idea to put aside something for savings and/or paying down any outstanding loans every month. Then I add these up to say okay, here's how much I need each month to pay the bills. Subtract that from my monthly income and that's what I have for spending money. I get paid twice a month so I generally pay bills when I get paid. For most bills the due date is far enough ahead that I can wait the maximum half a month to pay it. (Worst case the bill comes the day after I pay the bills from this paycheck.)  Then I keep enough money in my checking account to, (a) Cover any bills until the next paycheck and allow for the particularly large bills; and (b) provide some cushion in case I make a mistake -- forget to record a check or make an arithmetic error or whatever; and (c) provide some cushion for short-term unexpected expenses. To be safe, (a) should be the total of your bills for a month, or as close to that as you can manage. (b) should be a couple of hundred dollars if you can manage it, more if you make a lot of mistakes. If you've calculated your expenses properly and only spend the difference, keeping enough money in the bank should fall out naturally. I think it's a lot easier to try to manage your money on a monthly basis than on a daily basis. Most of us don't spend money every day, and we spend wildly different amounts from day to day. Most days I probably spend zero, but then one day I'll buy a new TV or computer and spend hundreds.  Update in response to question What I do in real life is this: To calculate my available cash to spend, I simply take the balance in my checking account -- assuming that all checks and electronic payments have cleared. My mortgage is deducted from my checking every month so I post that to my checking a month in advance. I pay a lot of things with automatic charges to a credit card these days, so my credit card bills are large and can't be ignored. So subtract my credit card balances. Subtract my reserve amount. What's left is how much I can afford to spend. So for example: Say I look at the balance in my checkbook today and it's, say, $3000. That's the balance after any checks and other transactions have cleared, and after subtracting my next mortgage payment. Then I subtract what I owe on credit cards. Let's say that was $1,200. So that leaves $1,800. I try to keep a reserve of $1,500. That's plenty to pay my routine monthly bills and leave a healthy reserve. So subtract another $1,500 leaves $300. That's how much I can spend. I could keep track of this with a spreadsheet or a database but what would that gain? The amount in my checking account is actual money. Any spreadsheet could accumulate errors and get farther and farther from accurate values. I use a spreadsheet to figure out how much spending money I should have each month, but that's just to use as a guideline. If it came to, say, $100, I wouldn't make grandiose plans about buying a new Mercedes. If it came to $5,000 a month than buying a fancy new car might be realistic. It also tells me how much I can spend without having to carefully check balances and add it up. These days I have a fair amount of spending money so when, for example, I recently decided I wanted to buy some software that cost $100 I just bought it with barely a second thought. When my spending money was more like $100 a month, lunch at a fast food place was a big event that I planned weeks in advance. (Obviously, I hope, don't get stupid about ""small amounts"". If you can easily afford $100 for an impulse purchase, that doesn't mean that you can afford $100 five times a day every day.) Two caveats: 1. It helps to have a limited number of credit cards so you can keep the balances under control. I have two credit cards I use for almost everything, so I only have two balances to keep track of. I used to have more and it got confusing, it was easy to lose track of how much I really owed, which is a set up for getting in trouble." A debt is created when the service is rendered or the goods are sold to you.  The bill is simply a way of recording the debt and alerting you to it. "But I have been having a little difficulty to include the expenditure in my monthly budget as the billing cycle is from the 16th to 15th of the next month and my income comes in at the end of the month. Many companies will let you change the statement date if you want, so one way to do this would be to request your bank to have statements due at the end of the month or first of month. You can call and ask, this might resolve your problem entirely. How can I efficiently add the credit card expenditure to my monthly budget? We do this using YNAB, which then means our monthly budget is separate from our actual bank accounts. When we spend, we enter the transaction into YNAB and it's ""spent."" Additionally, we just pay whatever our credit card balance is a day before the end of the month so it is at $0 when we do our budget discussion at the end of each month." "I cannot answer the original question, but since there is a good deal of discussion about whether it's credible at all, here's an answer that I got from Bank of America. Note the fine difference between ""your account"" and ""our account"", which does not seem to be a typo: The payment method is determined automatically by our system.  One of   the main factors is the method by which pay to recipients prefer to   receive payments.  If a payment can be issued electronically, we   attempt to do so because it is the most efficient method.   Payment methods include: *Electronic:  Payment is sent electronically prior to the ""Deliver By"" date.  The funds for the payment are deducted from your account on the   ""Deliver By"" date. *Corporate Check:  This is a check drawn on our account and is mailed to the pay to recipient a few days before the ""Deliver By"" date.  The   funds to cover the payment are deducted from your account on the   ""Deliver By"" date. *Laser Draft Check: This is a check drawn on your account and mailed to the pay to recipient a few days before the ""Deliver By"" date.  The   funds for the payment are deducted from your account when the pay to   recipient cashes the check, just as if you wrote the check yourself. To determine how your payment was sent, click the ""Payments"" button in   your Bill Pay service.  Select the ""view payment"" link next to the   payment.  Payment information is then displayed.  ""Transmitted   electronically"" means the payment was sent electronically.  ""Payment   transaction number"" means the payment was sent via a check drawn from   our account.  ""Check number"" means the payment was sent as a laser   draft check. Each payment request is evaluated individually and may change each   time a payment processes.   A payment may switch from one payment   method to another for a number of reasons.  The merchant may have   temporarily switched the payment method to paper, while they update   processing information.  Recent changes or re-issuance of your payee   account number could alter the payment method. In my case, the web site reads a little different: Payment check # 12345678 (8 digits) was sent to Company on 10/27/2015 and   delivered on 10/30/2015. Funds were withdrawn from your (named)   account on 10/30/2015. for one due on 10/30/2015; this must be the ""corporate check"". And for another, earlier one, due on 10/01/2015, this must be the laser draft check: Check # 1234 (4 digits) from your (named) account was mailed to Company on   09/28/2015. Funds for this payment are withdrawn from your account   when the Pay To account cashes the check. Both payments were made based on the same recurring bill pay payment that I set up manually (knowing little more of the company than its address)." How about the fact that when a stranger calls me at 3pm on a Tuesday it means only a few things:  * I've forgotten to pay a bill * Someone I know is in the hospital * Someone wants my opinion on something I don't care about  At 3pm on a Tuesday (like nearly every other weekday afternoon) I'm busy.  I answer the phone to ensure it isn't a forgotten bill or someone in the hospital, but it's usually someone trying to sell me stuff or ask for my opinions.  I always decline.  BECAUSE I'M BUSY, LIKE EVERY OTHER WORKING ADULT WITH A FAMILY! As with most things accounting/tax related it depends. In general though yes. As an example, if the client were to buy equipment on credit before fiscal year end, in lets say December, but did not pay until the next year started in January, then under cash basis they would not have the purchase accounted for until they made payment. That means they could not claim any deductions from the purchase. Under accrual, the purchase would have been put on the books in December, when the equipment was installed, and they would have been able to claim any deductions. A loan is most generally a liability, a part of the balance sheet.  Expenses & income are part of the income statement.  Income is the net of revenues after expenses. The interest is an expense on the income statement, but the loan itself does not reside there unless if it is defaulted and forgiven.  Then it would become a revenue or contra-expense, depending on the methodology. The original purpose of the income statement is to show the net inflows of short term operational accruals which would exclude new borrowing and repaid loans. The cash flow statement will better show each cash event such as borrowing debt, repaying debt, or paying off a bill. To show how a loan may have funded a bill, which in theory it directly did not because an entity, be it a person or business, is like a single tank of water with multiple pipes filling and multiple pipes extracting, so it is impossible to know which exact inflow funded which exact outflow unless if there is only one inflow per period and one outflow per the same period. That being said, with a cash flow statement, the new loan will show a cash inflow when booked under the financing portion, and paying a bill will show a cash outflow when booked under the operating portion.  With only those two transactions booked and an empty balance sheet beforehand, it could be determined that a new loan funded a bill payment. "$500, this is called ""cash basis"" accounting. A large company might handle it otherwise, counting shipments/billings as revenue. Not you. Yet." I wrote a small Excel-based bookkeeping system that handles three things: income, expenses, and tax (including VAT, which you Americans can rename GST).  Download it here. It depends on the bank and network. Banks are to provide outgoing data at the certain time for the processing by the central clearing house (the Federal Reserve system, for ACH), which then distributes incoming data back to the banks. All this has to be done between the closing of the business day and the opening of the next one. If the transaction hasn't completed the full path during that time - it will wait at the position it was stuck at until the next cycle - next night. That's why sometimes ACH transactions take more than 1 day to complete (if, for example, multiple Fed banks have to be involved).