Tracking eligible expenses for reimbursement from 529 plan

Question

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I have a second year college student, and at this school students live on campus the first two years.  Tracking and drawing funds off the 529 plan has been simple - once per semester I submit a request for the plan to send a check to the university.  Starting next year, the student will live off campus so there will be new weekly and monthly bills in addition to the now lower semester bill for tuition at the school.  We'll have to pay out of pocket for example for groceries, and then submit a request to the 529 plan afterwards.  For those in the same situation, how have you tracked the expenses, in particular what has been reimbursed already vs what hasn't?  I figure I'll make a monthly submission to the 529 - for example submit in February for expenses paid out of pocket in January.  Does anyone have a custom report or custom budget categories that you found helpful?

NotACPA · Accepted Answer

For any expense that's  eligible for  reimbursement, I WOULDN'T record it using an Expense category,  but rather I use a Transfer to post that expense to a "Receivables" account that you'd need to create.

When you receive the reimbursement, then deposit it to your bank account again using Receivables as the transfer account.  Then you can "Reconcile" your Receivables account to make sure you got what you expected and reduce the balance in Receivables.  Using Filters,  you cause the account to display only Unreconciled transactions, which should keep the display relatively short, and only show the amount that you're still owed.

IF  you decide to  post the original expenses to  expense categories,  you should  post the reimbursement to the same categories so as to not artificially inflate those expense amounts.  Keeping track of the categories originally used could be a nuisance, which is another reason for Receivables.