Budgets - how does the community want to use them?

[Matt Graham]

G’day again all! Thank you everyone for your input – keep it all coming. The more diverse range of opinions I get, the better I can cut down to what we all actually need.

One thing that is becoming apparent to me is that we are all going around in circles. Some comments provided are almost exactly the same as comments provided circa 1993 to 1999! My general impression at the moment, is that it all gets very complicated very quickly when you look at the different objectives people have. Even with the small amount of responses so far, the complexity is starting to rise. 

To cope with this complexity and ultimately be able to build a clear understanding of what is needed, I have edited to the Gnucash wiki on budgets (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Budgets) to try and capture our overall requirements – what we want/need and why. My intent is for you to be able to skip the ‘history’ sections and go straight to discussion to get the facts of where the budget debate currently stands.

Its not anywhere near done yet. Need more input and to sort through all the input I already have. I’m hoping that after a while we can come to a base level of agreement on what should/shouldn’t be present, and then future generations will know why we did/didn’t do any particular thing.

Your input on the current state in my head (i.e. the “Requirements for Gnucash Budgets” section of the wiki) would be very beneficial. 

Wm and Mike Novak, you are the only ones so far who have mentioned ‘business budgeting’ suggesting that the current gui is set up well for this. Do you have a web link to something I can read about how businesses generally do budgeting? Or if you have time, can you email through a use case? Or Mike, what is “Standard book-keeping” way of doing budgeting?

Cheers,

Matt