Cash Reimbursement Question

1

My daughter reimbursed me in cash for a costume I purchased for her. How do I track the expense from my checking account using the envelopes?

I am not depositing the money she gave me into my checking account.

Also from the money she gave me, I did use $10 to buy them all ice cream today.

Confused on how to manage this!

2

Reimbursement can be tricky. Do you have a Cash envelope or account for your pocket money? If so, I would record your purchase of the costume as a transfer from your Checking account to the cash account, since you essentially just “withdrew cash”. You’ll need to deduct the money from Checking and that may be a good way to do so while still having the money to spend.
To record the ice cream, just record a transaction from your cash envelope.
Hope that helps!

3

Okay so when I do that it makes my unallocated account negative by that amount.

What I did was this:

  1. Create cash account. Put it to $0.00
  2. Created a transfer from checking to cash account for the purchase.

Cash account went up by $45
Unallocated went into the red by $45.

I feel like I am missing something because I am not actually accounting for the physical cash I have on hand.

Should I do this as envelopes instead?

Thanks for your help!

4

Hmmm…just moving money between accounts shouldn’t change your Unallocated balance at all, since it represents the aggregate amount in all your accounts. Did you already enter the costume purchase as a transaction? If so, then you’ve accounted for it twice. I would replace the “purchase” with the transfer and that should clear everything up. If it was part of a larger purchase (eg it accounted for $20 of a $100 shopping trip) you could enter the $20 as a credit against that envelope like you would for a return. That will increase your checking account by $20 which would also fix your Unallocated balance.
Personally, I have both a Cash account and a Petty Cash envelope so I can manage “pocket money”. I don’t actually track cash spending (I just make single aggregate transactions to keep things balanced) but that way I can account for cash withdrawals and such.
Does that help?

5

This worked thank you! My unallocated funds weren’t right for a different reason. Thank you for your help!