
Group buying transactions?
Newbie YNABer here - appreciate your patience if this has been asked and answered before.
I'm wondering how to log the following scenario - I purchase eggs directly from a farmer on behalf of a number of families in my neighbourhood. Eggs are delivered every other week and I pay for the whole order from my chequing account on delivery day. The other members of the group pay me ahead of time for 8 sessions at a time. In other words, I get a chunk of money every 16 weeks from roughly 10 people, and I pay out some of that money (plus my own share) every two weeks.
Any recommended approaches to keep this simple?
Thanks!
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Let's see... I'm typing as I think it through, so I reserve the right to come back with a better idea. 🙂
1. Make an Egg category (or if you do something similar with produce/meat, call it something like Local Food).
2. When neighbors pay you, inflow directly to the category. Their name would be the payee, and put #eggs in the memo. I would probably schedule the transactions to save work - more on that later.
3. Because you're also contributing, you would need to budget your portion of the eggs directly to that category.
4. When you pay for the eggs, the payee would be the farmer, memo #eggs. This is easily scheduled for every two weeks. I would do a bit of a trick here for cash-flow visuals, more on that later.
5. To see the status of everything, just go to the transaction register and search #eggs.
Pretty simple. You could use a goal on the category for your portion, but I'll break that out, too.
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One question comes up immediately - since I'm creating this budget mid-stream, I've already received the inflow from my neighbours (before my YNAB start date, so that money is sitting in my checking account as part of my starting balance). A recent payment for eggs means the Available column is showing as red/negative. Until I reach the next inflow (12 weeks or so), it will always show as negative because the only transactions will be outflow. Should my budget figure each month include the other group members payments, until the next round of payments? Sorry this is so confusing.