Like many people on this forum, I track all my spending and earnings to the penny with spreadsheets. I use my own rather than something like mint so I can categorize how I wish. For me the primary goal is to see where and how money is being spent or earned, and how I categorize my spending is a reflection of that, and not necessarily how something like mint would do it.
For example, if I go to a birthday dinner for somebody, I normally enter that under the 'gifts' column rather than the "restaurants', but if I were to buy drinks during the dinner I would normally put those under 'alcohol', not gifts or restaurants.
Anyway, I recently cashed in some credit card rewards points and I am curious how other spreadsheet nerds would have counted it. I used the points to get $150 worth of Gas gift cards, since this particular card didn't have a direct cash back / statement credit option. So the way I am entering it now is to enter $150 of income under "cc rewards", and then put a $150 under spending for gas.
Although this may give a slightly skewed version of my income, since it isn't really $150 I could have spent on anything, so Its not the same as if I found $150 cash in the road and then spent it on gas, even though that is basically how the spreadsheet is reflecting it right now. However I don't really know of a better way to count it.
The reason I chose gas is because it is something that I would have spent the money on eventually anyway, so in that sense it will all even out (it will show $150 in gas spending for this month, but then I won't spend anything for like two months, so the averages will accurately reflect my spending on gas, and due to the fungibility of money it doesn't really matter that the gas spending came from 'money' that couldn't have been spent on anything else, because spending it on gas frees up $150 that CAN be spent on anything else.
So anyway, despite the rambling this is obviously not a big deal at all, just interested in how other spreadsheet nerds handle unconventional 'income' like this.
Let me know what you guys think.