GnuCash: expense tracking/amounts left under limits
"Yes.  The simplest option to track your spending over time is to familiarize yourself with the ""Reports"" menu on the toolbar.  Take a look specifically at the ""Reports > Income/Expense > Income Statement"" report, which will sum up your income and spending over a time frame (defaults to the current year). In each report that you run, there is an ""Options"" button at the top of the screen.  Open that and look on the ""General"" tab, you'll be able to set the time frame that the report displays (if you wanted to set it for the 2 week block since your last paycheck, for example).  Other features you're going to want to familiarize yourself with are the Expense charts & statements, the ""Cash Flow"" report, and the ""Budgeting"" interface (which is relatively new), although there is a bit of a learning curve to using this last feature. Most of the good ideas when it comes to tracking your spending are independent of the software you're using, but can be augmented with a good financial tracking program.  For example, in our household we have multiple credit cards which we pay in full every month.  We selected our cards on specific benefits that they provide, such as one card which has a rotating category for cash back at certain business types.  We keep that card set on restaurants and put all of our ""eating out"" expenses on that card.  We have other cards for groceries, gas, etc.  This makes it easy to see how much we've spent in a given category, and correlates well with the account structure in gnucash."
"The answer was provided to me at the Gnucash chat by ""warlord"". The procedure is as follows: After doing this you will have:" I know nothing about this, but found this link which suggests for H&R Block specifically: I kept searching and I found the section. It's at the end in the Credits section under 'other backup withholding'. Hopefully this helps someone else in the future. "The standard double-entry approach would just be to create a Liability account for the loan, and then make a transfer from that account to your Asset (Savings) account when the loan proceeds are distributed to you. After that point, the loan doesn't ""belong"" to your Savings account in any way. Each account and transaction is tracked separately. So, you might for instance pay that loan back with a transfer from your Checking account, even though the initial disbursement arrived into your Savings account. In order to see how much of a loan you have remaining, you need to look at the loan's Liability account to see what transactions occurred in it and what its remaining balance is. It sounds like what you're really trying to accomplish is the idea of  ""earmarking"" or ""putting into an envelope"" certain assets for certain purposes. This kind of budgeting isn't really something that Gnucash excels at. It does have some budget features, but there's more about being able to see how actual expenses are to expected expenses for a reporting period, not about being able to ask ""How much 'discretionary' assets do I have left before I start hitting my 'emergency fund'"". The closest you get is splitting up your asset accounts into subaccounts as you suggest, in which case you can ""allocate"" funds for your specific purposes and make transfers between them as needed. That can work well enough depending on your exact goals, though it can sometimes make it a little trickier to reconcile with your actual bank statements. But there's not really an accounting reason to associate the ""emergency fund"" portion of your assets with the remaining balance of your loan; though there's nothing stopping you from doing so if that's what you're trying to do. Accounting answers questions like ""How much have I spent on X in the past?"" and ""How much do I own right now?"". If you want to ask ""How much am I allowed to spend on X right now?"" or ""Am I likely to run out of money soon?"", you may want a budgeting tool rather than an accounting tool." 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. For double entry bookkeeping, personal or small business, GnuCash is very good. Exists for Mac Os. In general you need to ask yourself how serious you are about tracking your finances.  If your GNUCash 'cleared' balance doesn't match your statement, it represents an error on either your part or much less likely the banks part.  Tracking down this error might be a real pain, but you will also likely learn from it.  So to answer your question - find the entry or entries that don't match and fix them.   That said, sometimes indeed this can be very tedious, time consuming and frustrating, especially if it is for a relatively small dollar amount.  Time too is money, so in these cases, the 'Expense:Adjustment' might be a reasonable approach. "I wrote a little program one time to try to do this.  I think I wrote it in Python or something. The idea was to have a list of ""projected expenses"" where each one would have things like the amount, the date of the next transaction, the frequency of the transaction, and so on.  The program would then simulate time, determining when the next transaction would be, updating balances, and so on.  You can actually do a very similar thing with a spreadsheet where you basically have a list of expenses that you manually paste in for each month in advance.  Simply keep a running balance of each row, and make sure you don't forget any transactions that should be happening. This works great for fixed expenses, or expenses that you know how much they are going to be for the next month.  If you don't know, you can estimate, for instance you can make an educated guess at how much your electric bill will be the next month (if you haven't gotten the bill yet) and you can estimate how much you will spend on fuel based on reviewing previous months and some idea of whether your usage will differ in the next month.  For variable expenses I would always err on the side of a larger amount than I expected to spend.  It isn't going to be possible to budget to the exact penny unless you lead a very simple life, but the extra you allocate is important to cushion unexpected and unavoidable overruns. Once you have this done for expenses against your bank account, you can see what your ""low water mark"" is for the month, or whatever time period you project out to.  If this is above your minimum, then you can see how much you can safely allocate to, e.g. paying off debt.  Throwing a credit card into the mix can make things a bit more predictable in the current month, especially for unpredictable amounts, but it is a bit more complicated as now you have a second account that you have to track that has to get deducted from your first account when it becomes due in the following month.  I am assuming a typical card where you have something like a 25 day grace period to pay without interest along with up to 30 days after the expense before the grace period starts, depending on the relationship between your cut-off date and when the actual expense occurs." "Other responses have focused on getting you software to use, but I'd like to attempt your literal question: how are such transactions managed in systems that handle them? I will answer for ""double entry"" bookkeeping software such as Quicken or GnuCash (my choice). (Disclaimer: I Am Not An Accountant and accountants will probably find error in my terminology.) Your credit card is a liability to you, and is tracked using a liability account (as opposed to an asset account, such as your bank accounts or cash in your pocket). A liability account is just like an asset except that it is subtracted from rather than added to your total assets (or, from another perspective, its balance is normally negative; the mathematics works out identically). When you make a purchase using your credit card, the transaction you record transfers money from the liability account (increasing the liability) to the expense account for your classification of the expense. When you make a payment on your credit card, the transaction you record transfers money from your checking account (for example) to the credit card account, reducing the liability. Whatever software you choose for tracking your money, I strongly recommend choosing something that is sufficiently powerful to handle representing this as I have described (transfers between accounts as the normal mode of operation, not simply lone increases/decreases of asset accounts)." I have only found solution for UK residents so far, see the article on This Is Money: Cheapest index-tracking funds: Trackers with the lowest charges - and the best ways to invest in them Limit books are managed by exchanges. If an order is not immediately filled, it is sent to the book.  From there, orders are generally executed on price-time-priority.  The one major exception is the precedence hide-not-slide orders have over earlier placed visible slidden limit orders since unslidden orders are treated like a modification/cancellation. To an exchange, a modification is the same as a cancellation since it charges no fees for placing or canceling orders, only for trades.  The timestamp is reset, and price-time-priority is applied in the same way, so if a modified order isn't immediately filled, it is sent back to the book to be filled in order of price-time-priority. "Gnucash is much more designed for accounting than for budgeting. While it does have some simple budgeting features, they're largely based around tracking how much has been spent in the Expense categories/accounts, and seeing how close one is to a limit that's been set. Because the point of Gnucash is accounting, there's not a way to track an expense in two expense categories simultaneously. (You can split a transaction across multiple categories, to have a grocery store purchase of $150 be split across $100 Food and $50 Phone Minutes or whatever. But not have a $150 purchase be tracked as $150 Food and $150 Household expenses, because that's not how double-entry accounting works.) The closest way to do what I think you're looking for is to take advantage of the hierarchical account structure, and repeat subcategories as needed. For example: This would allow you to see Household expenses vs. Vacation expenses, and still see what it got spent on. Reporting on all ""Food"" purchases, if you want to do so, is slightly more tricky as you'd need to select all those ""Food"" categories separately in your report, but it's possible. You speak about wanting to ""track"" expenses multiple ways, so I think that this would allow you to record data sufficient to ""track"" it. But the point of tracking any data is to be able to report on it in some fashion, so if you have more specific reporting requirements, you might want to ask about that as well." Mint has worked fairly well for tracking budgets and expenses, but I use GnuCash to plug in the holes. It offers MSFT$ like registers; the ability to track cash expenses, assets, and liabilities; and the option to track individual investment transactions. I also use GnuCash reports for my taxes since it gives a clearer picture of my finances than Mint does. If you want to keep any consistent standard, you need to knuckle down and make those transaction entries. Honestly, this is a lot faster doing in bulk than doing day-by-day.  But change how you account so it isn't annoying.  I minimize my bookable transactions.  For instance I deposit all income whole (for tracking) but stop tracking when the money is converted to cash or gift card money - I log adding $50 to a McDonalds gift card, but not the individual meals.  I only use cash for the myriad small things I do not want to track - fast food, parking meters, etc.  Anything big or that I want to track goes on a credit card.  Then it's easy to reconcile credit cards to accounting system.   (Cathy) Ryan's Law: if it wasn't written down, it didn't happen. "I found your post while searching for this same exact problem. Found the answer on a different forum about a different topic, but what you want is a Cash Flow report.  Go to Reports>Income & Expenses>Cash Flow - then in Options, select the asset accounts you'd like to run the report for (""Calle's Checking"" or whatever) and the time period. It will show you a list of all the accounts (expense and others) with transactions effecting that asset. You can probably refine this further to show only expenses, but I found it useful to have all of it listed.  Not the prettiest report, but it'll get your there." "For any accounts where you have a wish to keep track of dividends, gains and losses, etc., you will have to set up a an account to hold the separately listed securities.  It looks like you already know how to do this.  Here the trading accounts will help you, especially if you have Finance:Quote set up (to pull security prices from the internet). For the actively-managed accounts, you can just create each managed account and NOT fill it with the separate securities.  You can record the changes in that account in summary each month/year as you prefer. So, you might set up your chart of accounts to include these assets: And this income: The actively-managed accounts will each get set up as Type ""Stock.""  You will create one fake security for each account, which will get your unrealized gains/losses on active accounts showing up in your trading accounts.  The fake securities will NOT be pulling prices from the internet.  Go to     Tools -> Securities Editor -> Add and type in a name such as ""Merrill Lynch Brokerage,"" a symbol such as ""ML1,"" and in the ""Type"" field input something like ""Actively Managed."" In your self-managed accounts, you will record dividends and sales as they occur, and your securities will be set to get quotes online.  You can follow the general GnuCash guides for this.   In your too-many-transactions actively traded accounts, maybe once a month you will gather up your statements and enter the activity in summary to tie the changes in cost basis.  I would suggest making each fake ""share"" equal $1, so if you have a $505 dividend, you buy 505 ""shares"" with it.  So, you might have these transactions for your brokerage account with Merrill Lynch (for example): When you have finished making your period-end summary entries for all the actively-managed accounts, double-check that the share balances of your actively-managed accounts match the cost basis amounts on your statements.  Remember that each fake ""share"" is worth $1 when you enter it.  Once the cost basis is tied, you can go into the price editor (Tools -> Price Editor) and enter a new ""price"" as of the period-end date for each actively-managed account.  The price will be ""Value of Active Acct at Period-End/Cost of Active Acct at Period-End.""  So, if your account was worth $1908 but had a cost basis of $505 on Jan. 31, you would type ""1908/505"" in the price field and Jan. 31, 2017 in the date field. When you run your reports, you will want to choose the price source as ""Nearest in Time"" so that GnuCash grabs the correct quotes. This should make your actively-managed accounts have the correct activity in summary in your GnuCash income accounts and let them work well with the Trading Accounts feature."