Mainly a general accounting question (how to enter in Quicken)

bob2021

In order to properly account for 'purchases', for tracking/reporting/budgeting purposes, how would I go about accomplishing the following? I'm hoping to not need to create an additional account to accomplish this, but will if needed. (I'm a long time Quicken user, and know how to use split transactions.)

I purchase two concert tickets with a credit card for a total of $110, one for me, one for a friend, who will reimburse me later for his ticket ($55) in some fashion. I assign one leg of a split of the concert credit card charge to $55 to entertainment (for my ticket). I leave the category for the other $55 leg of the split blank (for now, anyway).

At the concert, we order dinner, and will be 'going dutch' (each covering our own expenses). To avoid needing for my friend to pay me in cash (or check) for his $55 ticket, he pays the entire dinner bill on his credit card. I pay him my dinner costs, minus the $55 he owes me, in cash ($60).

One thought was to enter $60 for (the category of) dining in my cash account, and then assign the other $55 leg of the concert tickets credit card split to dining as well. One thing technically wrong with that latter, is that that dining charge (category of one leg of the split of the concert credit card charges) has a much earlier date than when I actually incurred the charge. That probably is only a concern for budgeting purposes, since the tickets charge was a month prior to the day of the concert, where dinner was consumed.

Is this how I should account for things?

Later, I will make a credit card payment that 'pays' for the total concert credit card charge, although I don't know that this transaction has any bearing on how I account for what I've described.

jacobs

I have enough transactions like these that I do use an asset account for this purpose. (I call it "Exchange"; you can call it whatever you want.) It makes it easy for me to keep track of money owed to me, or that I owe someone. And it keeps my expenses in the correct time priod.

So in your scenario, I'd enter the purchase of the concert tickets as a $110 transaction in my credit card account. Two splits would put $55 to entertainment and $55 as a transfer to my Exchange account. When the dinner comes around, I'd record a $60 transaction in my cash account, with two splits: $115 to dining expense, and –$55 to Exchange. The entertainment and the dining expenses are each in their proper time period and the Exchange account now has a $0 balance. (I periodically reconcile the Exchange account just to document the offsetting charges which now zero out.) As you surmised the payment of the credit card bill from your checking account has no bearing on these transactions.