Budget questions. (wordy)

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 07:46:03PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb at becket.net> writes:
> 
> >> Your description of "cash budgeting" sounds like you're summing all
> >> cash debits and credits into one number for each period.  That seems
> >> like generating a periodic projected cash-flow report, yes?  
> >
> > Yes, except that budgeting and accounting are different tasks in my
> > thinking.  I'm content to continue budgeting with gnumeric; it's a
> > more static process.  (I make one budget in the year, I tweak it as
> > necessary.  I enter hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of transactions
> > in my accounting in the same year.)
> 
> My agreement here was over-hasty.
> 
> My cash budget is, in principle, a complete list of expected cash
> sources (debits) and sinks (credits), organized month by month.  (I
> don't bother budgeting expenses on more than an annual basis.)

That's an interesting point.  That means your month-to-month variation
doesn't come from changing expenses, since you just divide your total
cash credits by 12.  It can only be due to changing income and loans.

My code assumes you have only one budgeting frequency for the entire
budget, so it sounds like you'd want to easily enter the annual amount
and have it automatically distributed over 12 months.

> The rest is an optimization, not a change.  I generate this list by
> cribbing numbers from the expense budget, but it's not a different
> kind of thing.  The apparent differences were a way of describing my
> short-hand, not anything else.

Yes, that's good.  It means it's possible to generate the same
periodic projected cash flow report from the same numbers as the
budget variance report.

-chris