Budget View Implementation Question

Wed Apr 16 02:30:46 EDT 2014

   Hi Phil, David and Christian,
   thanks for your replies.

   On 04/15/2014 10:51 PM, Phil Longstaff wrote:

Do you have top-level accounts which don't wouldn't fall under Income,
Expense, Assets, Liabilities or Equity?  Or, are you saying that if those
are your only top-level-accounts, they aren't included?  Or are you saying
that if they are in a different language (e.g. German), they aren't
included?

Phil

   I was using three top level accounts: Income, Asset, Expense
   Income has type income, Asset has type asset, Expense has type expense.
   All of them without children (goto Account Dialog, last item "Parent
   Accounts" has "New Top Level Account" selected).
   I use English locale.
   How do you get to the idea that this might be a language specific
   issue?

   On 04/16/2014 02:36 AM, David Carlson wrote:

     As a user I certainly agree that the budget feature should be
     substantially improved. I will ask what you mean by top level
     accounts, the five basic types (Asset, Liability, Income, Expense
     and Equity) or the first detail level just below those? I think that
     there are two or more types of usage for budgets, one being limited
     to income and expense, and another being more oriented to cash flow,
     which may include assets and liabilities, and the budget (and budget
     report) feature(s) should work for either. Are you actually
     discussing budget reports? I do not see the totals that you mention
     in the budgets that I have in my data file. I think that budget
     reports should be addressed separately to avoid confusion.
     Theoretically, there could be several budget reports linked to a
     given budget. They too need enhancement along with documentation.
     Whichever you mean, please be very specific. I would be willing to
     help with the documentation soon as I expect to have more time free
     if I can get a different (less resource hungry) antivirus program
     installed and operating.. The one I have now is killing me.

   Right now, I am only referring to the Bugdet "editor"
   (Actions->Budget), not any report from the Reports menu.
   I setup only one budget period, so next to the account tree I see two
   columns, one for the budget period, and one column for the totals. The
   totals column is fine for both the totals from the account tree and the
   total from the summary table at the bottom of the page. The budget is
   fine for the period column from the accounts tree, but shows only 0.00
   in the period column of the summary table at the bottom of the page.
   When adding children to the top level accounts, everything is working
   fine.
   I have read about the two budget usage types in the documentation
   ("Income/Expense" and "Cash Flow"), but I do no see a relevance of this
   section for the Budget editor. I read it more  as a recommendation, but
   as far as I can see the editor does not depend on any certain account
   setup (apart from the "only one top level account per type").
   ... and good luck with the antivirus program ... ;-)

   On 04/16/2014 07:31 AM, Christian Stimming (mobil) wrote:

     I think those two limitations came in accidentally. When discussing
     and thinking about it, both should better be fixed instead of only
     being documented. If you have the time to do it, though.
     Regards, Christian

   For the "Summary table only showing 0.00 for accounts without children"
   issue I can provide a patch.
   For "Only one top level account per type" this is more complex, I
   believe that this is rather a concept related thing. In the very
   beginning, pointers are collected for each type, and only one pointer
   per type. And these are heavily in use afterwards. So my impression is
   that this is not trivial.
   What do you think about opening three bugs:
   - one for the "Summary table only showing 0.00 for accounts without
   children" (bug)
   - one for updating the documentation with the given limitation
   (enhancement)
   - one for removing the "only one top level account per type supported"
   issue (bug)
   The two first ones I see as candidates for 2.6.4++, while the last one
   I would not expect to start before 2.7.x (or whatever comes after 2.6).
   Kind regards,
   Carsten

   On 15. April 2014 19:32:15 MESZ, Carsten Rinke
   [1]<carsten.rinke at gmx.de> wrote:

Hi,

recently I started playing around with the budget feature, trying it out
with a simple account structure - only top level accounts.

Doing so I noticed
- In the summary view at the bottom of the page the totals per period
are not counted for top level accounts without children
- there is only one top level account per type allowed for the same
summary, no matter if they have children or not

I checked the documentation, but I did not see any hints to this
limitations.

Personally I would like to see the top level accounts considered, just
to avoid confusion.

The fact, to have only one top level account per account type is fine
with me. Here I would be fine with an update of the documentation.

Bottom line: I propose two enhancement bugs, one for code, one for
documentation.

Good proposal?

Kind regards,
Carsten
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References

   1. mailto:carsten.rinke at gmx.de
   2. mailto:gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
   3. https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel