Budgeting in Gnucash

[Ben Stanley]

Thoughts on budgeting periods:

For each expense, there is a date that the expense occurs on (possibly
regularly recurring) and an amount (possibly variable).

To cover this expense, we make a reghular contribution, possibly at the
same time as we get paid. These contributions become tagged, wherever
they may be stored. We should aim not to spend these amounts on anything
but what they were set aside for.

For expenses which vary over the year (eg heating, whether by
electricity, gas or whatever), we usually average out the contributions
over the whole year so that we set aside the same amount every pay
period.

However, how do we cope with a permanent change in expense? Or an
expense which may occur regularly over a period of time? There must be a
contribution to cover this. I see both the expenses and the
contributions as having a date range (possibly un-bounded) over which
they will be used. It would then be possible to plan a major change by
saying that some contributions will have a stop date, and other
contributions will have a start date. The contributions which are
activated on a particular date must look up these date tags.

Ben.

--
Ben Stanley               |    barf  [ba:rf]  2.  "He suggested using FORTRAN,
PhD Student               |       and everybody barfed." - From the Shogakukan
SITACS                    |       DICTIONARY OF NEW ENGLISH (Second Edition)
University of Wollongong  |
Australia                 |    http://www.uow.edu.au/~bds02