Re: Advanced Budget Report Question

[apowell656@gmail.com]

Forest, 
I agree with your response and I am not interested in changing any rules of finance. A simpler solution from how the current report is built would be to add another section for assets and liabilities, based on the BBS layout and formula. A user could either project for either or just one (me personally would just like to see liabilities I am paying for).

This would address the fact that currently there is no way to project a balanced budget without exporting the info to a spreadsheet or manually calculating the information. Where in my opinion both of these options are more time consuming whether at setup(spreadsheet) or at the time of (calculator) .

Needless to say my wishlist would be one of the following; if there is a way to actually pay on a liability and to get it to report as an expense that would be all the better for this report, or GnuCash to actually show the totals in the built in report so a user could get the info from one screen.

Best regards,
Andre Powell
(This is the first long email I have written on my Eris and not so bad of an experience)

----- Reply message -----
From: "Forest Bond" <forest at alittletooquiet.net>
Date: Thu, Jan 14, 2010 10:36 PM
Subject: Advanced Budget Report Question
To: "Andre Powell" <apowell656 at gmail.com>
Cc: <ben.johnsen at gmail.com>, <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>, <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>


Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 07:33:08PM -0500, Andre Powell wrote:
> I think that it would be fair to say that if I would decrease an asset in my
> budget it would be an expense (towards something) and if I increased it would
> go towards income. Regarding a liability much the same if I decreased it would
> be an expense, and increased it would be "income", although obviously debt.
> Although, I am no CPA I do not have an "official" answer, but it makes sense
> to me. In a more simplified way, and the way I think that most people would do
> a budget count the payments to a liability as an addition to your expenses and
> the math will roll on from there. 
>
> With all of that said, what are the odds of you adding Liabilities to the
> report with them impacting expenses. :-) 

I would very much prefer assets and liabilities to not be handled this way.

It is not consistent with current handling in the Budget Income Statement (BIS)
and Budget Balance Sheet (BBS) reports.  BIS only looks at income and expense
accounts.  BBS assumes that positive values entered for assets are savings and
therefore increase the value of those assets and that positive values entered
for liabilities represent liability repayments and therefore decrease the
liability.

If this interpretation needs to change, so be it, but I would really like to see
some discussion and consensus before the behavior gets less consistent than it
is now.

In any case, I think asset/liability values being somehow interpreted as
income/expenses is wrong.

Thanks,
Forest
-- 
Forest Bond
http://www.alittletooquiet.net
http://www.pytagsfs.org