I received gift cards for Christmas, but I do not want anything from those stores. So I want to use the gift cards for the stores to buy groceries and pay myself back so I can buy my gifts from places that I want to shop.
Even though I’m going to use gift cards to buy groceries, I still want the groceries to report for my December spending. Conversely, while I will use actual money to buy my gifts, I do not want to this to count towards December spending. I may be overthinking this, but I don’t know how to make this happen. One thought I had was to create an account called gift card and enter income entries from various gift cards I receive.
Hi there,
Your idea sounds reasonable:
- create an account for each gift card, and set the balance to its correct balance. These balances will go to Available.
- create an Envelope, e.g. “Gifts for Me” and Fill from Available for the total amount of the gift cards.
- When you buy groceries, record that to the Groceries Envelope and whichever gift card account you used. (When you get down to the very end of a gift card, you may need to record two expenses for that shopping trip, where one uses up the balance of the Gift Card Account, and the other pays the remainder of the expense on your Checking Account, for example.)
- When you buy gifts, record that to the “Gifts for Me” Envelope and the account you actually use, e.g. Checking.
Merry Christmastide!
Really the only way to do this where the gift purchases do NOT count as spending in GB and don’t cause any problems with reconciling with your bank later is to withdraw from your bank a cash amount equal to the gift cards. Record the cash withdrawal in GB as a Groceries expense, spend the gift cards on groceries, and spend the cash on your gifts without recording it in GB at all.
When you reconcile or import your bank transactions, the cash withdrawal will match your GB entry and your gift purchases will not be tracked anywhere.