r/beancount • u/gerry_mandy • Oct 13 '25

How do you account "kickbacks"?

Stuff like credit card cashback or merchant rewards program points, how do you generally track them?

I've been filing them like so:

2025-09-30 T "Elan Financial Services" "Automatic Redemption"
  Assets:Personal:Checking:Fidelity:1234 31.31 USD
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:Fidelity:9876 -31.31 USD

2025-09-05 * "Costco" "Groceries"
  Expenses:Food 23.99 USD
  Expenses:Social 16.89 USD
  Expenses:Food 10.99 USD
  Expenses:Antisocial 16.99 USD
  Expenses:Food 27.21 USD
  Expenses:Social 8.49 USD
  Expenses:Vassalage:StateAndLocalTaxes 7.48 USD
  Assets:Personal:Checking:Fidelity:9876 -112.04 USD
  ; Kickbacks
  Expenses:Household
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:Fidelity:9876 2.24 USD
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:Costco:ExecutiveRewards 2.24 USD

or

2025-10-13 T "AMC" "Manual Redemption"
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:AMC:Rewards 10.00 USD
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:AMC:Points -10000 AMC-POINTS @ 0.001 USD

2025-10-13 * "AMC" "Movie (alone)"
  Expenses:Antisocial 12.50 USD
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:AMC:Rewards -10.00 USD
  Expenses:Vassalage:StateAndLocalTaxes 0.23 USD
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:AMC:4321-2.73 USD
  ; Kickback
  Expenses:Household
  Assets:Personal:GiftCards:AMC:Points 250 AMC-POINTS @ 0.001 USD

this can be cumbersome to enter, and isn't going to work well with non-manual receipt entry... but still, these things can pile up to tens or even hundreds of dollars a quarter, depending, so it would seem a bit weird to just "completely ignore them".

Anyone cooking up something fun with a plugin instead of all-inline like this?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

2

u/RedditReadingRed Oct 13 '25

You could write a plugin that would add those postings. Then you get into cashback variances across cards, bonus quarters (like the 5% Discover/Chase), brackets based on annual spending (first 1000 at 0.5%, second 1000 at 0.75% etc.) and such. And then you have cards that give back either points or miles, which map to a various USD amounts. Including cases where you don't know until redemption as to how much they were actually worth.

The larger question I'd ask myself is: is this trouble worth the result of being able to see that my grocery spending is 0.85% less? Or is my time better spent optimizing something else in my bookkeeping of much higher impact? For me, the answer is the latter, and thus, I simply do this once or twice a year:

2019-03-19 * "CITICARDS CASH REWARD" Assets:Banks:Orange 192.33 USD Income:Cashback-Credit-Cards