GnuCash Budgeting

[Darin Willits]

On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 13:45, Englisch, Volker (NIH/NCI) wrote:
> Hi Darin, 
> 
> I'm not directly on the gnucash ML (I'm getting the GnuCash Digest). 
> So I'm writing to you directly.
> 
> I'm excited to see that something is starting to develop in terms of
> budgeting for gnucash which is my main reason why I haven't switched
> to using gnucash yet and I do like your approach since I believe it is
> pretty much all that I would need for my personal use.
> 
> Anyway, the reason why I'm writing is the following.  I was wondering
> if the budget that is being created would be able to include entries
> that are set up as scheduled transactions?  I am currently using MS
> Money and I have set up almost all of my bills as recurring
> transactions (monthly, quarterly, annual, ...).  When I'm creating a
> budget I would expect that these fixed expenses I've already set up
> (utility bills, car insurance, mortgage, etc.) could be used to
> prepopulate the budget categories.

Yeah, I was thinking about this as well.  The reason I hadn't put
anything in the "Gather initial data" screen is that I haven't fully
thought this through yet.  You might be right though and we could give
the user a choice between:

1) Populate budget from account data.
or
2) Populate budget from scheduled transactions,
or
3) Use both 1 & 2 (not sure how this would work in some cases but worth
a think...)


> 
> I could imagine to display the scheduled transactions on the 'Gather
> Initial Data...' screen for the user to highlight those to be included
> in the current budget - maybe I'd like to plan my budget for the time
> after my car has been paid off.
> 

This would be cool too.  I have a feeling that designing a nice robust
way to initially populate a budget will be a project in and of itself. 
I am planning on starting with getting a framework in place where the
user can enter their own data, and once we have that progress onto some
analysis tools to populate things automatically.  So much to do and so
little time!  

> Nice job!
> 

Thanks!

Cheers,

Darin