Budgeting proposal

[Dave Fancella]

Hmm, something just occurred to me.

On Thursday 17 April 2003 05:14 pm, Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> I think I see where the miscommunication is occurring.  I don't mean
> that Accounts and BudgetCategories are *not* linked--quite the
> contrary.  It'd not be very useful to have an unlinked BudgetCategory,
> when you are generating reports, etc.  How would you measure your
> progress against the unlinked BudgetCategory?
>
> OTOH, if you creating a new Budget, it's possible you may not have
> created the associated Accounts yet.  Therefore, you'd need the ability
> to create BudgetCategories without linking.

If you're creating a new Budget, and there are no accounts yet to associate 
them, then it stands to reason that GNUCash would have a feature that says 
"Automatically mirror new Budgets" or something like that.  So it would 
automatically create the account to match the Budget, and do so with an 
expanded dialog or something that lets you define the account at the same 
time.  That way, creating a new budget on a new account tree would be almost 
seemless to the end-user.  Of course, the end-user still needs to know what's 
going on, just like you can't use a calculator if you don't know math, but it 
would keep things simple.  A corresponding Druid that goes through unlinked 
Budgets and lets you link them to existing accounts or create new accounts 
would also help a lot.

Not that this stuff will get done any time soon.  :)  One step at a time....

Dave

> Admittedly, this ability can get you in trouble when dealing with
> reports, etc.  As with other things in Gnucash, and many other
> applications, it's up to the user to make sure all the links are set up
> correctly prior to running a report.

-- 
"I slipped inside the oval office,
I slipped in oh so fast,
Grabbed the president by the necktie
And wiped my funky ass, hey"
                -Soulhat, "Bonecrusher"