Representation of repeating budget amounts

Ngewi Fet ngewif at gmail.com
Sun Oct 25 03:56:45 EDT 2015


Hello everyone,
I've been looking to implement some support for budgeting in the GnuCash
Android app.
To this end, I've read up a bit on the history of the budgeting feature in
GnuCash and also examined the current desktop UX interaction.

On the desktop, after creating a new budget, we have a list of accounts for
which one can enter different amounts. However, unless I'm misunderstanding
it, I also noticed that it seems to be necessary to enter the budget amount
for each period in the budgeting periods. From what I can see, each
BudgetAmount entry (in SQL) has its own period number, amount and account.

On a mobile device, it's not feasible to show the table view to enter
amounts for each period, and even if it were, I feel it would be too
cumbersome.
I think it would suffice to select an account, an amount and it should be
applied to all periods in the budgeting period.

So, is there a way to enter the amount just once and have it applied to all
periods in the budgeting period? Also, how would this be represented in the
data model?  How can I save a BudgetAmount that is representative of all
periods? Does GnuCash desktop support this?

One suggestion is to save a period number of 0. Any BudgetAmount with that
period number would be taken to apply to to all periods in the budgeting
period. All others would have periods >= 1.

I would appreciate input on how best to implement this.

Regards,
Ngewi Fet


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