double entry bookkeeping loan to myself

Question

I have 3 accounts - savings, outgoing, and loan.

I have $100 in savings. I then receive $50 into savings. so far, so good.

Then I want to 'borrow' $25 from savings with the intention of paying it back. so I debit savings and credit loan for $25.

Then I want to spend this $25, so I transfer from savings to outgoing, but if I do this, I end up with transactions all over the place, or otherwise the loan account ends up being $0, or the outgoing account has double $25.

I'm not sure where I'm going wrong. I just want the loan account to total $25, the savings account to be $25 less, and the outgoing to be $25 more.

Can someone help instruct me which accounts I should be crediting and debiting and in what order?

I'm using gnucash.

user42405 · Accepted Answer

Gnucash is an accounting tool, and accounting-wise the concept of a "loan to myself" doesn't really make any sense. A loan in accounting-speak is either a liability (if it's money you owe somebody else) or an asset (if it's money that somebody else owes you). Gnucash (and double-entry accounting in general) doesn't really work well with the "budgeting envelope" approach of having a bucket of money but pretending to yourself that it isn't there.

The closest thing you can get is subaccounts. So, rather than your asset accounts strictly matching up exactly with your actual bank accounts, you can divide them in subaccounts, with an account structure like:

Assets

Checking
Savings

Long-term Savings
Short-term Savings
Free to spend

And the various subaccounts of "Savings" would add up to be the amount that's actually in your bank savings account. You can transfer money between the various "buckets" that you've set up in your own transactions that your bank knows nothing about. In your example, you could transfer $25 from "Long-term Savings" to "Free to spend", and then transfer further from there to your Expense accounts.

It makes a bit trickier to reconcile with your bank statement, but it's doable if you really want to approach it like that. If you want to figure out a total of how much you have transferred out of "Long-term Savings" to other savings accounts, you can create a Transaction Report on that category, which might be the closest thing to figuring out "how much you need to pay yourself back".

But it sounds like the way you want to approach your accounting is more of an envelope-based approach than a double-entry-based approach, so you may want to (1) explore if some other personal finance tool is more to your liking, or (2) rethink how you want to frame your finance in a more double-entry-friendly way.

Andy · Answer

then i want to spend this $25, so i transfer from savings to outgoing...

This is where you went wrong.   You credited $25 to the loan but spent the money from savings.  You instead need to spend from the loan account.   Once you do this, everything will match up.  This will look like a credit to the loan account and a debit from an expense account (rather than savings).

polpak · Answer

My accountants do my tax returns... they advised sending money from one of my accounts to another is a Capital Transfer.

Am trying learn how to use gnucash.

Mark Description for the transfer as  "Capital".

For Sender/Remitter am regularly using short codes for sending and recipient accounts.

Example: (sender)+space+(recipient) 
Example:  "abc1234 def5678"

Depends on bank statements space for code sizes to use in their accounts.

Found made easier for the accountants and myself to easily understand.

.

ligfx · Answer

I wanted to add on to this as I hadn't seen anyone make the connection to fund accounting. Fund accounting is a bookkeeping system often used by government and non-profit agencies to track individual funds within the larger organization - e.g. for separate programs or departments that have their own budgets and cash flow, or money restricted for certain purposes.
You can conceive of your personal finances as operating on multiple funds (or budgeting envelopes): your general fund, and your savings fund.
When you borrow money from your savings account, you mark down an asset in your savings fund and a liability in your general fund. So, your journal entry would look like this:
Cr Savings - Cash account $25
Dr Outgoing $25
Dr Savings - Receivable $25
Cr General - Payable $25

You end up with a total of $150 worth of net assets in your savings fund, and a total of -$25 worth of net assets in your general fund.
(There are other ways to do this if you want to separate your savings fund from your physical account, or just keep everything in one main cash account. Look up fund accounting or net asset classifications for more information.)

double entry bookkeeping loan to myself

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