budgeting

[Todd T. Fries]

Penned by nigel_gnucash-devel@unos.net on Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 09:27:30PM -0700, we have:
| At that point we *know* that we have $500 sitting in the bank, and we
| don't have to stress about minor repairs or maintenance.  I don't
| necessarily care *where* that money is physically located, though,
| because I can move money around at will in physical accounts.  So the
| "buckets" are logical entities completely separate from any specific
| physical account.  (A side effect of this is that when I charge
| something to a credit card, I count is as "spent", but it's still
| actually located in my savings account, so I accrue interest until I pay
| the bill, and I'm *guaranteed* to have the money around to pay my credit
| card bill, which means no finance charges).
| 
| The whole "bucket system" is actually a little more sophisticated than
| that, but that'll do for now.
| 
| And now, to gnucash...  >)   To pull this off in gnucash, I think we
| need another field in the register, which I'll call "category" for now.
| If we tracked a "category" (notice: separate from expense - I track my
| video rentals and movie tickets separately from an expense perspective,
| but I budget $40 for "Entertainment" every month) for every expense,
| it'd be trivial to write a report which read a file containing your
| monthly allotments and caps, then processed all your expenses and did
| the math for you.

The online bank I used to use (www.sfnb.com -> www.centura.com) used
a system where you selected for each transaction a payee and a category.
This was quite flexible.  I do believe that another entry should be
possible without a tone of headache; after all, there are already several
types of entryfields in the leger, and they all auto-populate when a 
similar memo field is matched (I LOVE this feature btw)... Category would
definately help with budgeting.  Although I wonder if perhaps it would
help if we could have some ability to select 'attributes' that we can
tag onto each entry.  Thus not limited to one 'attribute'.  This does
complicate things in that we'd have to be wary of double-counting things
in a budget.  Aka if we have 'walmart' and 'milk' on the same entry, we'd
better not have an entry for 'milk' and another entry for 'walmart' in the
budget ;-)

I don't know how much you guys will like this comparison, but this seems
like vnd/ccd from BSD land.  vnd is Linux's 'loop0' device.  ccd is
the concatenated disk device.  Somehow the budget 'maps' onto the various
accounts by allocating pieces of each of them and then concatenating them
together.  You can't have any more in the budget than you have 'disk space'
aka money in the accounts ... a little harder on the math side than the
disk allocation side, but the hard limits are the same ;-)

| Right now I do it using a *much* ickier and complicated procedure.  I
| can make it work in gnucash, so I know the basic philosophy is sound,
| but without hacking some new code (which I don't have time for right
| now), I'm forced to use a really kludgy manual system which I won't
| describe here.

Feel free to point me at an url with sketchy docs and usable examples.
I'm not afraid of the bleeding edge...
 
| What would be the objections to adding a field to the register?  How
| much pain and suffering are we talking about?  Could we add another
| "style" of ledger, maybe, so that people who don't *want* the category
| don't *have* to use it?

Sure.  Probably on the requested features list, but .. I'd like to suggest
that if one sets a style for a particular ledger, that it get remembered
the next time it's open.  Setting multi-line every time I open a ledger
is getting old already ;-(

| Honestly, I'm willing to write some code for this, and was planning to
| at some point, I just really don't have the time right now.

Thanks for your plans!  Probably I'm dreaming, but if I could get the
gnucash application to run on the XFree server under cygwin, I'd satisfy
my wife's requirement for being able to do the budget on her system, and
perhaps get away from excel ;-)  (yes, I hear the cringes already, but ..
I feel it would be a more productive use of my time than developing, say,
a windows interface ..)
-- 
Todd Fries .. todd@fries.net