Budgeting Summary 1 - first draft

[Rick Ziegler]

Greetings all-

>From reading the summary, I think that the conversation may benefit from
nailing down some options regarding the loose coupling between accounts
and budget categories.

The option I like best is to:

1)    Define a budget within an alternate account heirarchy for a givin
period.
2)    Define a budget category as an account with associated value
deltas.  Category may be a placeholder account.

The non-obvious component to using this method is the question of
non-accounts ( ie: saving for a truck ).  
In this case, one could create categories under an asset account in the
budget heirarchy.  This is similar to the way people currently use
gnucash accounts do a budget.

The current balance in the category could be computed either as:
1)   A percentage of the deltas: if I contribute $1000 to the savings
account, 20% is earmarked for the truck, 80% for my retirement.
2)   A priority system: 100% of my deltas go towards my highest priority
( truck ), until the goal for the period is reached.  Then the 2nd
priority, and so on.

Again, this may be what everyone is thinking, but I have not heard it
stated explicitly.

These alternate account heirarchies should be available in all reports
too :)

regards-

Stewart V. Wright wrote:
> G'day All,
>   
> <SNIP>
>