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Say, for example, I am ordering pizza with some friends and I pay for the whole meal and then later receive payments from my friends to cover their portions. What is the correct way to categorize this in Mint?

I assume I would split the original transaction so that the portion I am responsible for is categorized under 'Fast Food', but how should the other portion be categorized? How should I categorize the payments received from the others later?

I want to be able to categorize these so that the portion that I am not paying for does not affect any of my balances or budgets.

mark.monteiro
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    Can you enter a reversing entry for the repaid portion? IE $30 pizza then a -20 entry later netting to $10 against your fast food budget. Not sure how mint handles such things but that's the approach I use in budgeting. – Hart CO Aug 17 '18 at 16:47
  • With all of their recent changes (More ads, cutting bill pay) I actually fully switched to Personal Capital. There's a lot of neat functions you can use like manual accounts for tracking things like money your friends / family owe you, etc. I use it a lot, it's great. – schizoid04 Aug 17 '18 at 21:57
  • @schizoid04 It's U.S. only unfortunately – mark.monteiro Aug 17 '18 at 22:03
  • Those are loans, and loans are assets. Thus, create an asset type called Loans, with a sub-category for each of the friends that you loaned money to. – RonJohn Aug 17 '18 at 22:07

2 Answers2

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The way I do this is the same way I handle tax refunds. I just add a negative expense on the same category where I paid for the item. This effectively reduces your spending amount in that category by offsetting it.

JohnFx
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Do not split the original transaction. Assign the payment from your friend the same category as the original transaction. Since the payment is a negative amount, your budget categories will reflect only how much you actually spent.

Todd
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