Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

[Kaaren Shalom & Richard Gilligan]

On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 01:04 PM, Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> 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.

In a minimal description, a budget is a set of amount&timeframe pairs 
associated with a split group.  At present the only split groups that 
gnucash supports are accounts.  I think "what we want" is to be able to 
define budgets for the accounts that we have now.  If gnucash is ever 
extended to support Categories (another kind of split group)  the same 
facilities can be used to set and report budgets for those.  Decouple!


Cheers,

Richard