Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

[Jack McKinney]

Big Brother tells me that Stewart V. Wright wrote:
> 
> In summary VAs are a imaginary asset/liability/expense 
> source that are used to divide income and expenses as 
> defined by the user. The major difference from regular 
> Accounts is that a leaf VA will mirror all expenses to 
> the first (real) Account that sits above it. VAs will 
> not contribute to the calculation of assets, 
> liabilities or expenses of the Accounts under which 
> they are leaves.

    I wrote an accounting system that accomplishes this without the
special accounts, which might be useful here.  It is a web based
accounting system... perhaps I'll set it up on my external web server
and post a u/p here.  I have completely switched to GnuCash at this
point, but I miss my budgeting.
    What I did was this: subaccounts work exactly like gnucash subaccounts.
Even for reconciliation: you have to enter a subaccount to mark an entry
has having cleared.
    What is different is twofold:  Firstly, I allow the user to enter the
date that it cleared the bank instead of just yes/no.  Secondly, there is
a link called "register" that brings up all uncleared transactions for an
account and all subaccounts in a single window.  An uncleared transaction
is one that has a nonzero change outside the parent's hierarchy.  So, of
the tree transactions below, "Salary" and "Rent" would show up in the
register for Cash in Checking, but "Budget" would not:

2003/09/01 Salary
     Income.GnuCash Inc                           -$1000.00
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Main                  $1000.00

2003/09/01 Budget
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Main                 -$1000.00
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Required               $500.00
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Living                 $200.00
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Fun                    $200.00
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Savings                $100.00

2003/09/01 Rent
     Assets.Cash In Checking.Required              -$300.00
     Expense.BLFH Properties                        $300.00


   To clear the Rent transaction, I could either go to the "Required"
account, or click on the register button for Cash In Checking. The
Budget account has a net change in Assets.Cash In Checking of 0, so
it would not show up on the register page.
   The only other significant difference between gnucash and my system
(as far as clearing transactions goes), is that you do not have cleared
fields on EVERY account.  Any account that can have cleared transactions
has to be marked as a "register" account.  Thus, my Assets.Cash In Checking
and Liabilities.Credit Cards Payable.GnuCash One  accounts would have the
register turned on.  This means that any display of the register accounts
or their subaccounts would have a cleared column, and the top account would
have a register button on the chart of accounts (and ONLY the top account).
   
-- 
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature  Jack McKinney
 exposed to our method of questioning.             http://www.lorentz.com
         -Werner Karl Heisenberg                   jackmc at lorentz.com
                                                   1024D/12C23A80 4096g/CA714907
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