How should I track payables/reimbursements?

jemenake

I'm using Simplifi to manage an account where several people are purchasing items with the understanding that they'll be reimbursed later. When I've done this is Quicken in the past, I would set each individual as a payment category (like "Slush:JohnDoe"). When they'd give me a receipt, I'd add a $0 transaction in the ledger with a split showing, say, $100 from Slush:JohnDoe and then $100 to whatever they bought. So it looks like John simultaneously loaned us $100 and then we bought the item that John bought for us.

Then, periodically (in Quicken, mind you), I could generate a report of all of the "Slush" category to see what we owed people, and I could make true-up payments to the individuals. Kind of a quick-n-dirty way of managing accounts payable.

This is a little problematic in Simplifi because I can't find an easy way to generate grouped-by-subcategory reports to see what I owe everybody. (It's also a little annoying because these ad-hoc "loans" we get from people buying things don't show up as liabilities, so the net worth of the account goes up and down in ways which don't mirror the times of the actual purchases, but that's less of an issue)

I've considered making a liability account, and having the purchases be a split with a transfer from the liability account into the main account to represent the loan from the person purchasing the item (instead of just money falling from the sky into the account with the category of Slush:JohnDoe). This makes it really easy to see how much we still owe on the left-side column, and it also is figured into the net worth, but I don't know how to track what we owe to the individual people without making a separate liability account for each person.

Any suggestions on how to do this (other than using Quickbooks, which seems like way overkill for our purposes)

DryHeat

@jemenake

Have you considered creating a Tag for each person (with names like "Slush:John") and tagging each transaction with the proper person?

You can filter by Tag, and starting all the Tags with "Slush:" would make it easy to find the right ones.

jemenake

@DryHeat I considered using tags, but didn't pursue it because it wasn't very clear how I could see totals for just those tags in reports. I'll experiment with it some more. Thanks.