In this video, I'll show you how I handle Amazon Gift Cards and returns for store credit in YNAB.

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**** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ****

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I handle Amazon Gift Cards and returns for store credit in YNAB.  Although I'm making this specific to Amazon and to YNAB, you can use this method with any online store that gives store credit or gift cards and any budget system that allows for split transactions.

The combination of my aversion to in person shopping and Amazon's quick shipping means that we buy A LOT of stuff from Amazon.  In addition, this year we seem to have gotten a lot of Amazon gift cards.  My son graduated from high school and got a bunch of gift cards, my husband got one from his firm as a token of appreciation, and I just got one from Gallop as a reward for participating in a particularly comprehensive survey.  If you've ever gotten an Amazon gift card, you know how they work.  You apply them to your account and then the next purchases that you make automatically come out of this gift card until the sum is depleted -- at which point they go back to charging your default payment method. 

The problem is how to account for these in your budget.  After all, no cash actually changes hands, it all happens on Amazon's end.  Let me give you an example with this $50 gift card that I recently got.  Okay -- if this was cash, I would have added to my budget category "Lara's spending."  But since it's an Amazon gift card, I couldn't, so I applied it to our Amazon account.  The problem was that I didn't immediately have $50 worth of stuff that I wanted to buy on Amazon AND, since Amazon uses all of your gift card funds before using your default payment method, that $50 got used on a bunch of things that weren't necessary for me.  First of all, let me show you where you can find what purchases were made with each gift card.  First click on Account and Lists, then click on Gift Cards.  The screen that comes up shows your "Gift Card Activity."  So, here we can see that my gift card was added on March 20th and then each of these line items shows a purchase that was made with the funds on this card.

Okay -- so I think best in spreadsheet form and this is a perfect excuse to create a spreadsheet, so here's mine.  I'll include a link to a sample spreadsheet that you can copy and use for yourself in the description to this video.  I copy these lines into a spreadsheet and then I add a couple of other columns.  The first column is Category.  So, what category should the cash or purchase come out of.  I put the original $50 in my category, but I don't know what was purchased in the others, so I go back to the website.  By clicking this link, you can determine what the purchase was.  So, I spent $25.25 on parts to fix my wheelbarrow.  In the next column, I that description.  Now that I know what I bought, I can enter the category, which in this case is Household.  So, I do this for each new transaction.  In this case, it turns out that I bought 2 things for Household and 2 things for me and 1 think that was a gift.  This next column shows a running total.  I started out with $50 and each time there was a purchase, it took money out of that $50 until the total was zero.  So, now I have this all accounted for, how do I enter this into YNAB?  Again, no real money is changing hands, so I don't have any money hitting or coming out of my accounts. 

Here's what I do.  I create a new transaction -- I usually put this in my main bank account, but because the transaction will total zero, it doesn't matter where you put it.  I just use today's date and put in the Payee as Reimburseable Transaction just to show this transaction is going to equal zero.  For category, I choose Split or Multiple Categories and both the outflow and inflow will equal zero.  Okay -- now the first line will be amount of the Amazon gift card $50.  I put Amazon as the Payee, choose Lara's Spending for the Category, write in the memo the reason for the gift card and put in $50 in Inflow.  Then, I'm going either put each transaction in as a line item with the amount going into the outflow column.  In this case, I'm going to combine some since I have multiple purchases in Household and multiple purchases in Lara's spending.  I'm using my spreadsheet as a reference and to add up the transactions, but in the end, the YNAB transaction should equal zero and it does.  Then I save this transaction . . .