Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

Matthew Vanecek mevanecek at yahoo.com
Fri Aug 29 16:04:23 CDT 2003


On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 14:13, Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> 
> > The 'Virtual Accounts' is the proper way to implement budgetting.  A
> > budget is a separate entity.  It's relationship to your accounts is very
> > loose and malleable.  You can associate a Budget account with an actual
> > account of a completely different name.  The budget is editable separate
> > from the accounts it is supposed to be guiding.
> 
> OK. Fair enough. Would my idea help people stay within their budget accounts
> then? I use a variation of what I described in managing my accounts against
> a flat file budget. It works pretty well. But what I described earlier would
> make what I do even easier.

I think some people already do some of what you mention.  I don't think
they move money around at reconciliation time, but I could be wrong.

Only self-discipline can help a person remain within a Budget. =P 
However, automated reports comparing Budget to Actual seems to me more
effective.  Take your flat-file budget, or spread sheet budget.  How do
you compare that to your actual cash flow?  Well, you open the file, and
you open Gnucash, and you look at the two, or perhaps get a limited
transaction report from Gnucash.  The basic process of *doing that*
needs to be implemented--we don't need to design a new process.

I'm afraid that your proposal would add way too much complexity to the
system for too little benefit.  It would also not be very scalable.  If
you maintain the Budget and the Accounts as two separate unrelated
entities, you create many possibilities with respect to planning, data
extraction and exporting, and reporting, that simply don't exist if you
tie the Budget to the Accounts too tightly.  The only relationship that
exists between the Budget and the Accounts is the same as when you
compare your flat-file to your Gnucash accounts:  You mentally decide
that row A in flat-file is the row for Expenses:Movies.  Only in the
program, the same relationship would be a user-definable attribute of
the Budget category.  You could just as easily decide on row B instead,
and you also have the freedom of changing the dollar amount in your
flat-file...or creating multiple flat-files.

Now, please realize, there are many opportunities for exploiting the
relationship (or lack thereof), that would make the whole thing useful. 
Over/Under reports, forecasting, etc.  But they all result from the
relationship, not the data.  Having the Budget and Accounts w/o tools to
exploit the relationship relegates us back to the "look at the file,
look at the Gnucash account" mechanism, or to the sub-accounts
work-around.

Am I making sense, or just typing too much?

-- 
Matthew Vanecek
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
********************************************************************************
For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me.
I'm always getting in the way of something...



More information about the gnucash-user mailing list