I'm wondering how I can ignore certain transactions from being counted towards income and expense in my reports.

The reason is my work-related expenses, where I pay using a credit card, pay the credit card company from my personal account, then I am reimbursed from my employer. These expenses and reimbursements can be significant, multiple times my monthly salary, so they totally scew the reports of income and expense. I've considered simply deleting these transactions from Skrooge, but then the total amount is wrong for reconciliation/checking, since the reimbursement doesn't always happen the same month, and can be a different amount cause it can include a per-diem or a mileage expense for driving my personal car.

These transactions are income/expense in the sense that it's money flowing in and out of my accounts, but it scews the reports so I loose overview of my personal finances. It's not income/expense in the sense that it's not money i've earned nor money I'm spending on stuff for me. How is such a situation best handles in Skrooge?


A similar use case would be my friends going to the cinema. I buy all the tickets 29 November. They reimburse me 2nd December for their tickets. My November report says I spent a lot of money going to the cinema, although really I only bought 1 ticket for myself, the rest was simply fronting the cost for my friends. And my December report says I earned more money than usual. How to deal with this? I've looked in to tracking, but the transactions still count towards income/expense for that month.

Hi,

The best practice for that is to use the "trackers".
You can find the documentation here: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragea ... ckers.html

The trackers allow you to:
1- check that reimbursements are done
2- remove corresponding operations from reports and graphs

So, exactly what you want!

Thanks for the reply smankowski

I've been looking at the documentation, and playing around some more with trackers, trying to figure how to remove the operations from reports. I finally found the option to excluded (all) tracked operations from income/expense on the dashboards widgets (For anyone looking for it; hit the option symbol on the individual widgets, deselect tracked operations), and each report defined in Bookmarks.

I thought the best way to deal with any net profit/loss on tracked operations (like my per-diem for travel expenses) is to enter a 0-value split operation when closing the tracker, with one part associated to the tracker and an opposite part not associated with any tracker. But I tried that and the net profit isn't included unless I include sub-operations which also includes that "opposite" split. Is this really such a fringe use-case? I feel like I'm missing something.

One last thing, I don't see how to remove tracked operations from the "monthly report" template. Any advice?


EDIT: I think maybe the income/expense widget is a bug? The widget does not include the "net profit" from a tracker, as entered using a 0-value split operation. But when clicking Options -> Open Report on the widget, the report opened does indeed include the "net profit".

Furthermore, it seems "Monthly Report" also includes transfers as an income/expense. So simply moving money from one account to another distorts the actual income and expenses for that month. Is this intentional?

Running Skrooge v1.9.3beta on Kubuntu 16.04
Edit: Same behaviour on Skrooge v2.5.0

kjetil wrote:EDIT: I think maybe the income/expense widget is a bug? The widget does not include the "net profit" from a tracker, as entered using a 0-value split operation. But when clicking Options -> Open Report on the widget, the report opened does indeed include the "net profit".

The "Incomes vs Expenditures" widget can be computed on amounts of operations (in this case all splits are take into account) or on amounts of splits of operations.
In you case, you should try to enable the option "On sub operations".
Tell me if the result is the expected one.

kjetil wrote:Furthermore, it seems "Monthly Report" also includes transfers as an income/expense. So simply moving money from one account to another distorts the actual income and expenses for that month. Is this intentional?

No, in monthly reports:
- Tranferts are not included in "Incomes vs Expenditures"
- Tracked operations are included in "Incomes vs Expenditures"

This is intentional because "Tranferts" are done the same day (So, no need to include them for nothing) but "Tracked operations" can be done on different months.

Hi there smankowski, sorry for the shamefully late reply, life suddenly got very busy for a while.

Enabling "include sub-operations" didn't quite give the expected result, as it included both the negative and positive sub-operations. Here's an example of what I'm looking for:
I pay 1000 in work-expenses.
Employer reimburst me 1200 for my expenses + my per-diem (food etc)
This is a net +200 for me.

I'd like the +- 1000 not to be counted towards income/expense because this is completely related to my employer.
I'd like the +200 net to be counted as income because it's indirect expenses. (I get the same per-diem whether I eat at a fancy restaurant or cheap street-food, so this net profit is in my control and goes toward me)


I will continue testing and I think I can make it work for my purposes using tracked and split operations, especially since these days my work-expenses and reimburstments aren't as significant as they used to be.

Monthly reports I think i'll just avoid for now as I don't see a way to customize it to be meaningful in my usecase.



On a sidenote, isn't my question sorta the same as wolftune in Feature request: option to sum same-category income/expenses

Both or use cases could be accomplished using a tracker where the incomes and expenses of that tracker aren't counted, untill the tracker is closed, at which point the net result of that tracker is counted as either an income or expense?

kjetil wrote:Hi there smankowski, sorry for the shamefully late reply, life suddenly got very busy for a while.

Enabling "include sub-operations" didn't quite give the expected result, as it included both the negative and positive sub-operations. Here's an example of what I'm looking for:
I pay 1000 in work-expenses.
Employer reimburst me 1200 for my expenses + my per-diem (food etc)
This is a net +200 for me.

I'd like the +- 1000 not to be counted towards income/expense because this is completely related to my employer.
I'd like the +200 net to be counted as income because it's indirect expenses. (I get the same per-diem whether I eat at a fancy restaurant or cheap street-food, so this net profit is in my control and goes toward me)

Well, you have 2 operations:
1- The expenditure of 1000€
2- A refund from your employer of 1200€

If you do that:
1-Assign a tracker to the 1000€ to be sure you are well refund
2-Split the 1200€ with 1000€ assigned to the same tracker and 200€ without tracker

Then, you can build reports or show "Income and Expenditure" widget and ignoring tracked operations.
In this case only the 200€ will be taken in consideration.

kjetil wrote:

I will continue testing and I think I can make it work for my purposes using tracked and split operations, especially since these days my work-expenses and reimburstments aren't as significant as they used to be.

Let me know.

kjetil wrote:Monthly reports I think i'll just avoid for now as I don't see a way to customize it to be meaningful in my usecase.



On a sidenote, isn't my question sorta the same as wolftune in Feature request: option to sum same-category income/expenses

Both or use cases could be accomplished using a tracker where the incomes and expenses of that tracker aren't counted, untill the tracker is closed, at which point the net result of that tracker is counted as either an income or expense?

To be honest, I didn't fully understand the request of wolftune...
... we will see.