Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

Jack McKinney jackmc-gnucash at lorentz.com
Sat Aug 30 19:46:30 CDT 2003


Big Brother tells me that Jon Lapham wrote:
> 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 have seen this POV mentioned several times, and I just don't grok
it.  What it seems to come down to is, spend the money, then check the
budgets afterwards to see if you screwed up. 
    In other words, you can budget one of two ways: before the fact or
after the fact.  The "envelope" system of having subaccounts of the
main account is the before method.  If your mortgage payment is $800,
and you are paid twice a month, then you can budget $400 into your
housing subaccount every paycheck, and thus know that you will have
enough for the mortgage payment on the 1st.
    This is even better when you have to pay $900 for your car insurance
every six months.  By putting $75 into your car budget every paycheck,
then you'll have your $900 after six months.

    With after the fact budgeting, you mark each transaction in some
way and then do reports to see how you are doing.  What I don't grok
in this method is how to see how much I have available to spend.  My
account may say that I have $900 in it, but I don't know that $800 of
it is "reserved" for the upcoming mortgage payment.  If I want to buy
that new DVD burner for $150, GnuCash tells me I have it, but in reality
I don't.  I have to run reports to try and figure it out.

    It seems that there ought to be room for both methods...
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