I'm wondering how to properly balance a transaction involving employee reimbursable expenses. I want to account for the type of expense, the balance on my credit card, and the expected reimbursement.
Here is an example:
2024-06-01 Airfare
expenses:airfare $300 ; bought an airline ticket
liabilities:credit-card $-300 ; payed for with my credit card
assets:receivables:employer $300 ; this is a work expense so I should be reimbursed by my employer
; what goes here to balance the transaction?
My question is what account is supposed to be used to balance the transaction? Am I going about this the wrong way?
Strictly speaking, it's not your airfare expense - you wouldn't want this showing up in your personal income statement. So you would omit the first posting.
You could still report how much you were reimbursed for air fares, by matching on the description, or a tag like airfare: or for:airfare (and possibly --pivot:for).
I sometimes record the amount like this, if I want the transaction to show up when I search for expenses:airfare:
2024-06-01 Airfare
assets:receivables:employer $300 ; this is a work expense
expenses:airfare $0 ; bought an airline ticket
liabilities:credit-card $-300 ; payed for with my credit card
I use the same 0 amount trick to have a link between dividends and the originating security, I think it's a general nice way to link something together without having a (financial) impact on it. Never thought to use it for this, but it's nice.
That's a clever trick. I will keep that in mind whenever I want to keep those links. In this case, I'm OK accepting the idea that it's not my airfare expense, but rather it is my employers. I can tell that it is an airline purchase from the other transaction details if I need to review it in the future.