'funds' accounts to match expense categories

Carolyn Hicks carolyn@bannoy.net
Sat, 06 Jan 2001 19:18:33 +1100


I've tried various messy ways of getting gnucash to behave in the way my
insanely complicated spreadsheet used to, and am not having much luck.
What I want to do is to match each of my expense categories with a
'funds available' category, which would be a kind of hypothetical
account representing the amount of money I have set aside for a
particular expense, such as rent. So when money comes in, it gets split
between the various funds and I can see that I have, for example, enough
money set aside for the upcoming rent payment but have overspent what I
budgeted for on food.

To implement this, first I set up a bunch of 'Funds' accounts, the sum
of which was supposed to equal my bank balance, but this got awkward
when I paid cash for things, and I got annoyed with not being able to
get a running balance for the combined accounts to reconcile with my
bank statement. Then I embarked on a system in which one transaction
generated four entries - one transferring between my bank or cash
account and the expense account, and one 'refunding' the bank/cash from
the funds account. This had the result that a) my bank account always
had an apparent balance of $0, and b) I went completely insane trying to
maintain it. Then I abandoned the Funds accounts altogether and wrote a
Perl script to calculate how much money should be available based on how
much was supposed have been set aside in my budget and how much has been
spent, but this is distinctly sub-optimal. So, now I'm stumped.

The trouble I guess is that I'm trying to represent money in two places
at once - once where it 'really' is, in a bank account or an envelope in
the kitchen drawer or whatever, and once where it 'hypothetically' is,
in a box marked 'rent' or 'food' or 'drugs', which must violate all
sorts of accounting principles. So, is it possible to do something like
this with gnucash? 

-- carolyn