budgeting

James LewisMoss jimdres@mindspring.com
23 Nov 2000 02:59:24 -0500


>>>>> On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 00:23:56 -0500, Aaron Peromsik <aperomsik@mail.com> said:

 >> From: James LewisMoss <jimdres@mindspring.com> Date: 21 Nov 2000
 >> 03:08:01 -0500 I want my budgeting system ...

 >> ... to add transactions automatically

 >> ... to mark transactions as automatically added so I can make sure
 >> they are ok.  ... to remind me to add items.

 Aaron> I guess this is as good a place as any to introduce
 Aaron> myself... I'm a Quicken user interested in switching to
 Aaron> GnuCash if the right things happen with respect to scheduled
 Aaron> transactions. By day, I'm a CAD software developer. I don't
 Aaron> have much free time to contribute to GnuCash development, but
 Aaron> I'll start by joining the discussion and take it from there.

Great.

 Aaron> Quicken draws a distinction between "budgeting" functionality
 Aaron> and "scheduled transactions." I find the scheduled
 Aaron> transactions useful as reminders, but I don't use the
 Aaron> auto-entry functionality because I don't want things entered
 Aaron> as paid until I actually mail the check.

I agree there is a distinction, but I see scheduled transactions being
very useful for budgeting, so for the moment I'm including them
together in my head.

 Aaron> On the other hand, having things entered in the register in
 Aaron> advance would be useful for cash flow management. Currently I
 Aaron> duplicate my scheduled transactions for the next couple months
 Aaron> in a StarOffice spreadsheet to help me decide how much money
 Aaron> gets transferred from savings to checking in time to pay the
 Aaron> bills. If Quicken -- or more likely, GnuCash -- would have
 Aaron> some in-between state for scheduled transactions which show up
 Aaron> in the register but are not really entered yet, this task
 Aaron> would take a lot less duplicative effort.

 Aaron> ...
 Aaron> What do other people think of these suggestions?

I like this a lot actually.  I don't know how difficult it'll be to
implement, but the functionality sounds quite useful.

Jim

-- 
@James LewisMoss <dres@debian.org>      |  Blessed Be!
@    http://jimdres.home.mindspring.com |  Linux is kewl!
@"Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours." Bach