Budget reports

[Forest Bond]

Hi,

I've recently started using GnuCash and have been pleased with it's features for
tracking finances.

I've started using it for budgeting, as well, and, as is likely well-known, the
budget reporting features are rather limited at the moment.  I'd like to spend
some time improving GnuCash in this area.  Before I started, though, I wanted to
bounce some questions off of GnuCash developers.

I'm particularly interested in having reports that make it easy to answer
questions like:

 1. If I stick with the budget, how much will I have saved by the end of the
    year?

 2. How much money can I allocate to savings once expenses have been taken out?

 3. How are we doing against the budget?

I have to imagine that these are pretty typical budget-related queries.  #3 is
partially handled by the current Budget Report.  #1 and #2 are rather difficult
to determine.  I suspect that the following reports would go a long way toward
resolving this:

 * Budget Balance Sheet: This report would be like the Balance Sheet report
   but would reflect projections based on budget data rather than showing
   actual values.  It could also show both actual and projected figures.

 * Budget-versus-actual bar charts for income, expenses, net profit, assets,
   and liabilities.

I think that the Budget Balance Sheet can give a good overview of how funds
are allocated over the budget period.  This would be useful to figure out if
more money can be saved and/or what expenses can be reduced to increase savings.

The budget-versus-actual bar charts would be useful for quickly determining
what might be causing us to not stay within the constraints of the budget.  The
Budget Report could then be used to get more detail.

So, here are my questions:

 * It seems natural that the Budget Balance Sheet could actually be a combined
   report with the current Balance Sheet report, but with different options
   selecting budget data instead of actual data.  This might lead to a
   complicated user interface since the granularity of budget figures is one
   budget period, while actual figures have granularity of one day.  Thus,
   selecting the report time period would have to be done differently depending
   on whether we are using budget or actual figures.  This leads me to believe
   that it may best be presented as a separate report altogether.  Thoughts?

 * The budget-related reports are currently being scattered in the report menu
   hierarchy.  Should there be a separate "Budget" sub-menu?  Obviously, this
   conflicts with the idea of re-using the Balance Sheet report to display
   budget figures as well.

 * The practical value of the "Budget Flow" report is not extraordinarily
   obvious to me.  It isn't much like the "Cash Flow" report, anyway, so the
   name is not incredibly meaningful.  What kind of user queries is this report
   intended to assist with?

Any input would be appreciated.  I'd like to get some reports in place very
soon, but I'd prefer to get some input from GnuCash developers before beginning.

Thanks for your time.

-Forest
-- 
Forest Bond
http://www.alittletooquiet.net
http://www.pytagsfs.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/attachments/20081214/8265da34/attachment.bin