Budget advise - DIY or use the built-in?

[Aaron Laws]

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are there any general/specific suggestions for budgeting using
> Gnucash? Or am I just trying to shoehorn accounting and budgeting
> together in a bad way?
>
> My main goal is to be able to tell fairly quickly (at a glance, if
> possible) the answer to the following questions:-
>
> 1. Am I on track with budgeted savings (vacations, kids' education
> fund, etc.)? This is separate from retirement/life savings.
> 2. How much of budget X have I spent this month/quarter/year (where X
> can be one of clothes, gadgets, movies etc.)?
> 3. How much more can I afford to spend of budget X this month/quarter/year?


I'm not a professional nor licensed accountant. I've used gnucash for a few
years now for personal and business accounting.

It does seem possible to follow allmybrain's advice and set up the books
according to his recommendation. I would create the budget accounts
(Budget:Food for example) as assets rather than liabilities. (Think about
when you don't spend all the money budgeted, do you really have remaining
liabilities, or remaining assets?)

If you're just looking for a relatively small number of budgeting accounts,
consider creating subaccounts of your actual asset accounts that are
holding the money. For instance, if you want to save up for a vacation in
your chequing account, create an Assets:Chequing:Vacation account and move
money from Chequing to Vacation as desired. The balance of Vacation is
visible at a glance, and even simulates an encumbrance on the funds by
reducing the chequing account balance. (In this case, before you reconcile
your Chequing account, do a no-balance-change reconciliation to reconcile
all the Chequing to Vacation transactions.)