How to model for shared expenses

[namezero911]

Hi,

I'm wondering how to model a shared expense scenario, making sure that my reports don't show incorrect values.

Here is an example:
I pay for a trip that I do together with my wife. Let's say I put this as a withdrawal of 1000€ into MMEX, using the "travels" category.
My wife and I shared the costs, so she wire-transfers half of the expenses to my checkings account. I'm currently putting this as deposit into MMEX, using a different category (not "travels"), because MMEX's help page explicitly says this:

Do not use the same category for Deposit and Withdrawal transactions, as this will upset overall balance figures.

The problem: the generated expense reports will tell me that I spent 1000€ on traveling, which is semantically incorrect. In reality, I only spent 500€. What should I do? Should I ignore the advice in the manual and use the same category for the withdrawal and deposit, and hope for the best?

Cheers!

[Nikolay]

I'll prefer the following scenario:
- Create "My-wife" account.
- Transfers half of the expenses to my checking account from "My-wife" account
- spent 1000 on traveling
or 500 + 500 with notes my_travel_expenses and my_wife_travel_expenses
or 500 on travels + 500 on travels_my_wife

But if you want to see only your expense:
- spent 1000 on traveling
- deposit 500 on the same category as wife's part of the expenses. (Use "travels", ignore rules)

[namezero911]

Thanks for your response. I'll try to use the same category then.

[siowena]

namezero911

While the rule is as you quote, this is really from main accountancy rules - I've been doing what Nikolay suggests in his part 2. I've not seen any major issues yet.
I tried having a reimbursement category, but that still showed I spend 1000 on travel and has 500 reimbursement so budget reporting was off.

So, for business expenses I have a separate reimbursement category because of the my way of needing to track my business expenses and the reimbursements in my payroll.

For personal expenses where I'm getting monies from other people (such as you do with your wife) or companies give refunds direct to cc, I just put a deposit from the same payee on the same category.

So far I've not see any issues. Some custom reports show a category as an income category when it's really an expense due to it having a +ve transaction.

For my partner, I have a separate account also and transfer monies from her to the appropriate account, but for most people they're just another payee.

[SereneLandscape]

What's the latest guidance on handling Category names for reimbursements? In the MMEX Help, I also see "Using the same category for an income and an expense will upset balance figures" and the Help documentation advises subcategories of "Fuel" and "Fuel Reimbursed."

If possible, I would prefer to see Fuel and its reimbursed money cancel each other out, so that the total Fuel is actually what came out of my pocket for Fuel. Before I build out my system, would someone be able to give me guidance on which of these directions will be most successful?

[frankieorabona]

There isn’t a single “correct” way to model reimbursements in MMEX — it depends on what you want your reports to show. However, some approaches tend to work better than others depending on the use case.

1. Using the same category for both the expense and the reimbursement (e.g. Fuel –100, Fuel +40) is often the simplest solution for personal finances. In this setup, the reimbursement acts as a reduction of the original expense, so reports and budgets reflect the real out-of-pocket cost. This works well, but it does go against the general recommendation in the Help documentation.
2. Using a separate reimbursement category (e.g. Fuel / Fuel reimbursed) follows the documentation more strictly and is appropriate for formal or business accounting. The downside is that reports will still show the full Fuel expense, which can be misleading if your goal is to understand your real personal spending.
3. A very practical compromise is to use a parent category. For example:

Parent category: Fuel

• Fuel paid
• Fuel reimbursed

With this structure, expenses and reimbursements remain clearly separated, but when reports are grouped by the parent category, the two values offset each other and Fuel shows the correct net cost. At the same time, expanding the category still lets you see how much was paid and how much was reimbursed.

This approach keeps the accounting logic clean, stays close to the documentation, and still produces meaningful personal finance reports — which is why many users find it the most balanced solution.

[SereneLandscape]

This is great - thank you! I have proceeded with option 3 (parent category).

I'm looking for reports grouped by the parent category. The "Where the Money Goes" report (under Reports > Categories) is very close to what I am wanting, but this report seems to divvy at the lowest subcategory level. I would like to have this report, but with 1) the parent category as the primary division and 2) another variation with the top subcategory as the primary division. Is this available? Maybe I need to build my own report?

[SereneLandscape]

The Reports > Categories > Summary report is a nice solution that gets me close to what I'm looking for. I would love to have a pie chart (to quickly glance at percentages as relations to each other) instead of the categories being listed alphabetically, but I could always grab the data and put it into a Sheets application to produce a chart. (I would also love a report variation with the top subcategory as the primary division.)

Note to newbies - Some report elements accept free text in the filters, even if they have a list of selectable values! Thanks to insights from Nikolay on another post, I'm able to get nice category-based data in the Transaction report by filtering on Category such as Transportation:.* (or Bills:Telephone.*). This rolls up both the expense and the reimbursement (e.g. Fuel –100, Fuel +40) so you can see the accurate, resulting figure for the category.