New Budget Report

Wed Jul 23 23:40:32 EDT 2008

Derek,

The thought for this budget was that I didn't want to have to select
accounts from an account list for the report after I had already gone
through the effort of creating the budget and adding a value to each
account I was interested in keeping track of in the budget.  The
information already exists in the budget, a report just needed to be
created using that information.  This also eliminates the problem of
accidentally closing the tab for the report and then needing to
reselect all of the accounts again when you want to regenerate the
report.

There are a few issues with the report.
Issue One: I don't include ASSET or LIABILITY accounts in the budget
report even if there is a budget value for them.  It would be easy
enough to add them in to the report but I couldn't figure out how to
deal with them in the TOTALs section.  Do I subtract them from the
income?  Do I add the ASSETS and subtract the LIABILITIES? How do you
deal with it when you remove money from the ASSET account to pay for
something?  These are the types of questions I couldn't come up with a
good answer to. I have tried to find literature talking about how to
deal with ASSET and LIABILITY accounts from a budget perspective but I
haven't found anything.  If you have any information or reading that
would be helpful let me know.

Issue Two:  I ran into an issue when subtracting two different values
using the commodity collector.  In the Diff column in the report I
would get "empty" values.  I tracked it down to the denom in the
gnc-numeric being different and when the subtraction happened this
resulted in an "empty" value.  Nothing was there in the report it
would just print a "$" sign and nothing else.  The denom seem to be
incorrect on some of the values I pulled from the budget.  I tried all
sorts of things like retyping the number into the budget.  It seemed
to be connected to number that had no cents (ie $300.00).  Even though
I typed the .00 it would still give the an incorrect denom.  As a
result I hard coded the denom to be 1/100.  So if there is a currency
that doesn't have two decimal places then this will probably cause an
issue.  If you are actually interest in seeing the issue I can try and
recreate it and send in all the information.

Issue Three:  On the row and column coloring I have a saturation and
color mixing issues.  You will notice that in the Options you can set
the colors for the rows and columns.  Well if you choose anything
other than gray it doesn't work real well.  Also if you set the gray
value too dark then it will saturate and turn the interesting area
white instead of black.  I didn't consider this a big issue since it
looked good for the default colors and people don't have to change it.

Issue Four: I don't do currency conversions during the summing process
for the TOTALs row so if someone tries a mixed currency budget then
the TOTALs row will be wrong.

There are also some feature I would like the add but I don't know when
I will get around to it.
Feature One:  I would like to add a black line above the TOTALs row at
the bottom of each section but I haven't been about to get anything to
work the way I want it too.

Feature Two: I want to put a disclaimer at the bottom of the report
that says the budget doesn't include ASSET and LIABILITY accounts if
the report finds that budget values were set on the ASSET and
LIABILITY accounts.  This changes if I figure out how to treat ASSETS
and LIABILITIES in a budget.

Feature Three: Be able to select accounts from a list instead of the
auto-find feature if someone truly desired to do it that way.

Feature Four: Have an option that if set would report on all
unbudgeted INCOME and EXPENSE activity.  Separate sections in the
report would be created for them.  This way if you forgot to add a
value in your budget for an account you would be able to notice it
fast because it would show in the unbudgeted section or for those
random expenses (ie Parking Tickets, Commission on Stock Transactions,
etc.) that you don't budget for but that you might want to look at
every now and then in the context of the budget. I haven't decided if
this belongs in the budget report or if I am starting to describe some
other report.

Anyway, that is probably far more information than you wanted.  I have
attached the report.  I have put the budget report in the same menu as
the other budget report and named "Advanced Budget".

Let me know if you have any questions or if something doesn't work.

Thanks,
Ben

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:27 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> "Benjamin Johnsen" <ben.johnsen at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I haven't done a lot of testing on it.  It works for me and my friend
>> but we are both working in USD.  So I haven't tested it with other
>> currencies and with mixed currencies.  I have a feeling that mixed
>> currencies won't work at this time since the summing that I budget
>> performs doesn't do currency conversion.
>>
>> So I guess my question is how do I submit it to you all for testing
>> and inclusion in the project?
>
> Send it here?
>
>> Thanks,
>> Ben
>
> -derek
>
> --
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>
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