Future allocated money, aka Envelope Budgeting

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Jan 31, 2018, at 2:48 PM, Phil Longstaff <phil.longstaff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 11:35 AM, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com <mailto:adrien.monteleone at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Jan 31, 2018, at 10:09 AM, Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com <mailto:christopher.lck at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Matt- I thought this should move to the devel list, because of technical details, and this discussion will be very speculative.
> >
> > I had a thought about how envelope budgeting could work: "divide your paycheck into separate envelopes for different purposes".
> >
> > A solution: *Create another type of transaction.*
> >
> > There's already u(n)reconciled, (c)leared, (y)reconciled, (v)oid transactions. And (f)rozen I believe is unused. Let's create a new type - (b)udget. But the balances are handled differently.
> >
> > It would require some UI and calculations changes --
> >
> > 1. The account budget balance is always maintained similarly to Running/Reconciled/Cleared Balances. But it would count all previous split-values *and* the (b)udget split amounts. However the budget running balance is not shown in the default register. This means, existing balances/register are unchanged.
> 
> Having transactions in an account register that don’t affect the balance is going to be very problematic. I think this would really confuse users.
> 
> I would think budget levels for each expense account could be exposed in the properties/preferences for each one.
> 
> That's basically how it's done now. It uses the kvp (key-value pair) mechanism and each account has a kvp per budget per period with the budget amount.

But I see they aren’t exposed in the Account Edit window. The only way to see what was budgeted is to open the budget module, or to see what’s left is to run a budget report. And even that part is limited as it’s only a all-or-nothing figure for the year, not year-to-date.

Regards,
Adrien
>  
> 
> The allocation of budget money would have to be handled with a special dialog on demand, or as part of an income/asset account preferences with percentages/formulas. (essentially a template transaction that fires when entries are made in that account)
> 
> We already have a budgeting mechanism to set how much we *want* to spend on a particular expense.
> 
> What we’re discussing here is a way to ‘save up’ funds received for each of those expenses.
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> If I understand correctly, the budget module uses hidden accounts to keep track of everything. I would think these same accounts, or other hidden accounts paired with them, could do the job.
> 
> This is incorrect. It uses kvp (key-value pair) structures attached to each account.
>  
> Phil

Thanks for clearing that up. Certainly, that seems the more sane route. I would think another set of kvp could be implemented to handle the envelope system then. One set to hold the amount already allocated and another to hold the allocation formula. The original budget pair could be used as the goal.