Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

[Jon Lapham]

Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> I think too many people are trying to tie a budget too closely to
> existing Gnucash accounts.  That's a mistake.  Budgets categories and
> Accounts really have very little in common.  

[snip]

> In short, budgets are planning and compliance tools.  Accounts are
> tracking tools.  You don't need accounts to create a budget; conversely,
> you don't need a budget to use accounts.  When you have both available,
> and can compare your actual to your planned (reports), you can really
> take control of your finances.  However, they *are* separate.

Yeah, what Matthew said.  I agree 100%.

*If* there is budgetting in GnuCash, I think (for what it is worth) it 
absolutely needs to be something completely separate from the existing 
functional system (I mean both in terms of code base and UI).

I'm also not entirely convinced that budgetting couldn't be done better 
as a separate app that "ties in" with GnuCash (ie: read-only access to 
the XML file, or read-only access to the database backend).

-- 
-**-*-*---*-*---*-*---*-----*-*-----*---*-*---*-----*-----*-*-----*---
  Jon Lapham  <lapham at extracta.com.br>          Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
  Work: Extracta Moléculas Naturais SA     http://www.extracta.com.br/
  Web: http://www.jandr.org/
***-*--*----*-------*------------*--------------------*---------------