Budget questions. (wordy)

[Tim Wunder]

Hi, 
I recently developed a paper personal expense budget. It involved reviewing 
past expenses utilizing gnucash 1.8.11 reports, some cumulative 
categorization, and a monthly estimate of expenditures, including those 
expenditures that do not occur monthly.
I figured this was as good a time as any to give the new budgeting code in 
G2/trunk a little test drive.
I'm using SVN sources from 11/7/2005
$ svn info|grep Rev
Revision: 11877
Last Changed Rev: 11877

So... to start...
The first thing I eventually found was under the File menu: File-Open-Open 
Budget. I kinda expected that access to the budget would be under Actions 
(cuz that's where the SX stuff is), or Tools (cuz budgeting is kinda like a 
tool), but I eventually found it under File.

So I opened a budget. The screen displays a duplicate of my account tree, that 
was good to see. And there were three very obvious buttons:
Budget Options -- which I presumed to be self explanatory.
Estimate Budget -- which I thought I understood to be a tool for, well, 
estimating a budget.
Delete Budget -- again, very obvious purpose for that button.

I decided to try each of the buttons out to see what they did.
Budget Options:
This button presents me with a window with two tabs, "Budget" and "Budget 
View". 

Under the "Budget", I'm presented with settings where I can Name the budget, 
and give it a description. OK, I guess that's useful. I assume you'll be able 
to create and maintain several budgets, and it'd be good to name them, and 
describe them.

It also presents what I guess are the options for Budget Periods. The dialog 
here is a little unlear, but intuitive enough, I suppose. Might wanna throw 
in a separator between the budget name and description section at the top, 
and the Period section of the Budget Options or lay it out in the same way as 
the GnuCash Preferences dialog -- tabs on the left, sections separated by 
titles in bold. But it was easy enough to figure out. 

The Periods default to Every 1 month(s), beginning today. And it's obvious 
enough to figure out how to change that. So I change mine to be the beginning 
of the month rather than today's date.

There's a check box for "same week & day" but I have no idea what it's for.
And finally a Number of periods setting that defaults to 12. Good, an annual 
budget. I think I'm OK so far.

Under the "Budget View" tab, I'm given a list of Account Types to Show. Nice. 
I like that. I proceed to Ctrl-Click to select multiple Account Types because 
I'm looking to just budget Expenses (and Liabilities). So I proceed to select 
Liability and Expense account types, and click OK. I'm then presented with a 
subset of my account tree, listing only the Expense and Liability accounts.

This is looking pretty good so far. On to the next button, the Estimate 
Button. And this is where I'm sure I don't understand what's supposed to 
happen. The tooltip says the button is used to "Estimate a value for the 
selected cells." OK, I guess that makes sense. I decided to select an account 
I wanted to budget and give the button a try.

First on the list was a Liabilities:Credit Cards:Citi Mastercard, I 
highlighted it, and selected the Estimate Budget button. It proceeded to fill 
in an amount of -200.00 for the month of November 2005. OK. that makes sense, 
I guess, $200.00 is what I paid on the Citi Mastercard this month. So I guess 
that's where it's getting the number. I then selected December 2005 and 
clicked the button again. Nothing happened. I was expecting that it'd 
estimate the value to be the same as the previous month, or maybe the value 
from the same month a year ago (or 12 periods ago, since I did configure the 
options for monthly budget period and 12 periods to budget).

Well, I figured I just didn't understand what the Estimate button was suposed 
to do, so I carried on with trying to enter a budget.
Hmmm... Now, why did it only list my Citi Mastercard? I have other Credit 
Cards... OK, I see, There's a Credit Card account type that my other Credit 
Cards are using. No problem, I went to Budget Options, and added Credit Cards 
to the list of accounts to view, and my other credit cards displayed. I 
selected another for budgeting, my Bank of America Visa card. I highlighted 
it, and clicked the Estimate button. Nothing happened. So now I'm starting to 
think that maybe my expectations of what the Estimate Budget button is going 
to do and what it is, in fact, designed to do are different things.

So this is where I stop testing to seek clarification. How's this Estimate 
thing supposed to work? 

Heck, a quick overview of how the budgeting stuff is nteded to work wouldn't 
hurt either. It'd help me in testing it out in a semi real life scenario.

Regards, 
Tim


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