Budget report

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 03:41:46PM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
> 2009/8/4 Chris Shoemaker <c.shoemaker at cox.net>:
> > On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 11:43:32PM -0400, Forest Bond wrote:
> >> Hi Phil,
> >>
> >> On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 12:02:07PM -0400, Phil Longstaff wrote:
> >> > The budget report is my current itch, so I've been upgrading it.
> >>
> >> ...
> >>
> >> I'd like to see the budget reporting improved as much as anyone else, and I'm
> >> glad that you are looking at it.  However, the semantics of budget data have not
> >> been clearly established, as I highlighted in a comment on bug #570895:
> >>
> >>   My current understanding of budget numbers is that if A and B are expense
> >>   accounts and B is a child account of A and both A and B have numbers entered
> >>   for a given period in the budget, the total expenses for that period is
> >>   A[period] + B[period].  In other words, A[period] doesn't *override*
> >>   B[period].  This is how things are handled in BIS, anyway.  I don't think the
> >>   correct behavior is documented anywhere.  This may be part of a larger design
> >>   discussion, so feel free to move it to the ML if you think it is appropriate.
> >>
> >> I'd really like to see some agreement on this before the budget reports get much
> >> further.
> >>
> >> Thoughts?
> >
> > What you describe is correct.  It's important to remember that:
> >  a. A and B may use different currencies.
> >  b. Budget values for an account are always in the same currency as the account.
> >  c. There *may* be no reasonable way to convert from one currency to the other.
> >
> 
> Where parent and children accounts are in the same currency a useful
> feature (for me at least) would be to show the budgeted, actual and
> diff values for the sum of parent + children as well as the individual
> parent and children account values.

You're certainly not alone.  Can someone propose a way to do that which
neither breaks nor produces incorrect or misleading results in the
case where A and B use different currencies with no conversion rate
available?

I think one solution would be to use a commodity collector which would
show non-zero values for all currencies used by an account or any of
its descendants.

-chris

> 
> Colin Law