SUMMARY How do you manage family (or more than 1 person) finance with KMM ? Today, solutions are 1. One KMM file for husband and wife. It works but it is not possible to sort asset/liabilities, income/expense by owner. 2. One file for the husband, one for the wife. How to deal with joint bank account ? Joint bank account can be useful in other situation, it would be nice to take into account a ratio (that can be used in reports)
You can use tags for that, whether using one or two files. Using two separate KMM files, it is possible for the same account to be present in both, although there is still no way to know which transactions relate to which person. With a single file, you can separate individual accounts in the accounts hierarchy, although that alone isn't enough for reporting. Can you elaborate on how you think a ration could be used - what would it change in reports? Another related problem I have had is that credit card accounts may have separate cards for each person, but there is no way to know which card was used for any particular transaction.
> With a single file, you can separate individual accounts in the accounts > hierarchy, although that alone isn't enough for reporting. Can you > elaborate on how you think a ration could be used - what would it change in > reports? > The ratio would be for situation like "I own 30% of this account, 60% of the other one", this ratio should be apply on transaction and assets in report to know your personal situation
At the creation of the account, there could be a checkbox to check if the user fully owns the account (checked by default). If the user unchecks this box, he's able to set how much of the account he owns. This ratio (100% by default or the value set by the user) would be applied on all expenses of this account in reports aggregating expenses from different accounts. Thus it would be possible for someone who owns a shared bank account to see in one report its personal budget, instead of having two manually aggregate two reports (one for its personal account and another for its shared account).
The way to do this in a double-ledger accounting is to create a Liability account for your significant other and split your expenses 50% between yourself (using relevant Category accounts) and said Liability account. Now, all your shared account assets should be also split between yourself and significant other. At the end of the day, they are not yours only, so your balance should also be properly reported. To simplify things and the amount of accounting, you can just move your SO's Liability account under your Shared Account, to make it its sub-cccount. This way your total on Shared Account will automatically be reduced by the Liability sub-account, and all your reports should display correctly. Note that I didn't test it, but it should work.
On a second thought, I oversimplified. This will work to some extent, but moving the Liability under the Shared account won't help with anything. Best you could do is to transfer half of the Shard Account assets to Liability account and continue to do so. As for proposed solution, I have a feeling it would be a bit too hacky to implement and complicate the code significantly. Have you by any chance compared the commercial software to see if they support shared accounts?
I don't think slitting accounts would work well. First the intent is to simply designate % owenership for multiple people, not to necessarily show them separately. For bank or investment accounts, how would you reconcile, as the institution's statement is for the entire account? Similar for loans. However, if the intent of this splitting is primarily for reporting purposes, I wonder if the accounts only need to store those %'s, but not have them affect the UI in any way. The actual effect could be handled entirely within various reports. It's seems like a variation in some parts of tax reporting (at least in the US) where some items can be designated as join, taxpayer, or spouse. That might make implementation simpler.
I've been dreaming of that feature for a few years. The two main purpose for me is to be able to split (%) of accounts or loan in the report. Mainly the net worth and the expense/budget report. The second is to improve the budget management. Currently I have to create 3 budget and 3 matching budget report: personal, SO personal and join. Which in the end is a pain to manage and understand. I always and up merging them in a spreadsheet. If the proposed ratio was implemented, it would be down to one budget per persons which would be a great improvement.