Budgeting in GNUcash

[Josh Sled]

On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 02:26:35PM +1000, Kieran wrote:

| Thanks for the quick follow-up, much appreciated, i'll have a look

BTW: If you can get 1.6.x running, the dependencies are nearly the same
for CVS.  The only major difference [I think] is g-wrap; 1.6.x requires
1.2.1, and CVS requires 1.3.2.  So, if you want to be able to use both
[1.6.x and CVS] at the same time, --prefix g-wrap 1.3.2 into somewhere
like /opt/gnc-unstable-deps/ and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH to get the right
g-wrap when you're configuring/building/running CVS.

[myself, I have a ~/bin/gnc-dev-env bash script that sets that up; I can
source it in the terminal I use for gnucash devel, and all is well in
that session...]

| On the other question though, is there a central person I can speak to
| so that I can help out (which-ever way)

I guess the closest to that'd be me... I started into GnuCash wanting
to do budgeting, and have a lot of notes ... but Scheduled Transactions
[SXes] is what got done [well ... close to done] first.

| > Kieran <gwalpole@bigpond.net.au> writes:
[deletia]
| > > Could someone (firstly) explain what the current status is (i've
| > > reviewed the budget.txt and it was last updated in 1998) and (secondly)
| > > what I can do to help out, whether it be testing the current progress,
| > > producing test reports, writing documentation, or providing suggestions
| > > on how I think it should be run.

Not much.
I have plenty of ideas, though. ;)

Some people want a budgeting report.  This is fine and well ... anyone who
wants to step up and write such a thing would be loved by many.  I want
a budgeting workbench, where one could try out "what-if" scenarios more
easily ... budgeting en-route to real personal-financial-planning.

This would definitely need to know about time and recurring elements.
Moreover, a lot more people want Scheduled Transactions than budgeting.
So SXes have gotten done first.  One important and reusable element that
has gotten done along the way is the FreqSpec [Frequency Specification],
which allows one to setup the schedule of known payments; budgeting will
be able to make use of this.  As well, once SXes are the in field, people
will start using them; when the budgeting subsystem does come around,
more people will already have a good starting dataset [their SXes] to
seed the budgeting subsystem.

So that's the state of budgeting.

For [most of] my budgeting notes, see the mailing list archives around
Nov-Dec 2000.  I have some more that I could digitize when appropriate.


I'm close to getting SXes to a state I would call "done" for 1.8, but
I've just started a new job [with 2 hours of commuting ea. day :(], so
it's been on a bit of a hold while I carve a schedule for myself which
allows time for GnuCash...

...jsled