Budgeting - Users to help?

[Phil Longstaff]

On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 07:13, Stewart V. Wright wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've been reading the users mailing list to find information about
> my particular itch that needs scratching by GnuCash: Budgeting.

Budgeting is my particular itch too.  I've just downloaded the 1.8.5
source and built it so that I can start.

> I realised that this is an issue that you keep getting asked the
> "when" question...
> 
> I have had a few ideas about it and after seeing Benoit's "State of
> the Project" document I want to help.
> 
> 
> My idea was to get a discussion going on the users list, collecting
> what we users want.  Then I was thinking, depending on activity -
> maybe once a week, bringing a "this is what we want" discussion over
> to this list.

Great.  I'm happy to let you get that going.  I'll spend some time
looking at how gnucash is architected.

> The point is to simplify the discussion (and your workload) so that
> than you developers needn't answer every little issue that is brought
> up.  Rather being able to say "Proposal 15 is not implementable
> in the current code base", or (hopefully) "OK that should be
> straightforward".  This does not mean that the code will be
> implemented, but if a clear plan of what _is_ to be done, then some of
> us newly motivated users can have a clear target to aim at.
> 
> The difficulty I see with implementing budgeting is that there doesn't
> seem to be a clear idea of what the user base wants to see, and more
> importantly, what is possible within the architecture that exists.

Well, almost anything can be implemented.  It may be more or less
difficult and the architecture may need to change to a greater or lesser
degree.  The important thing is what do the users want.

> I haven't seen any (formal?) discussions of how budgeting would be
> implemented, so I'm guessing we (the user list) could perhaps aide in
> this development.
> 
> However, before I start stirring on the user list, are their any ideas
> that people are actually working on at the moment, or does anyone have
> a reason that I shouldn't do this?

As mentioned in another e-mail there was a discussion back in April.

There are 2 parts to budgeting that I see.

1) Tools to produce a budget - forecasting, GUI to set up budget
2) Tools to monitor a budget - budget vs actual reports

My current need is for a month-by-month budget.  Other people have
mentioned longer budgets for e.g. an 18 month project.  I think we need
to have multiple budgets simultaneously.

Phil