Budget questions. (wordy)

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:38:55PM -0500, Tim Wunder wrote:
> 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.

Here's something else to think about: I really didn't count on people
wanting to budget for Liability accounts.  As a matter of fact, I
strongly considered not even having an "Account Types" option at all,
and just forcing it to Income and Expense.  I only left it as a "give
'em rope" option.

I suppose it *could* work as long as the user understands how
budgeting for Liabilities differs from budgeting for expenses.

E.g. If I want to budget for paying my loan down with expenses I would
say, "I plan to spend $200/month paying my brother back for that
loan." and would budget $200 in Jan, $200 in Feb, $200 in Mar, etc.

I guess I could do that with the liability account, too, as long as I
realize that the budget values are the *differences* between the
liability value from month to month and not the actual liability
values.  I.e. $-200 in Jan , $-200, in Feb, etc. but NOT $10000 in
Jan, $9800 in Feb, $9600 in Mar, ... etc.

Note: AFAIK, this type of liability budgeting is NOT standard
accounting practice.  What I described with income and expense
accounts is a standard "cash" budget.  Liability (and asset) planning
is usually done with a "financial" budget (basically a projected
balance sheet, with account values, not differences) or with a
"capital" budget, which is more free-form scenario-investigation.

The current gnucash budgeting code is only designed for cash
budgeting, so if you budget for liability accounts, you're really just
looking at incomes/expenses by their related differentials in the
liability accounts.

If it behaves intuitively for liabilities, I guess we can allow it,
but if it's confusing I'm inclined to restrict budgeting to
income/expense, because I think that would be simpler and more
standard.

-chris