Budgeting Summary 1 - first draft

marthter marthter at yahoo.ca
Mon Sep 8 18:04:20 CDT 2003


First off, excellent synopsis, thank you for your efforts on this...


Stewart V. Wright wrote:

>4.1.6 Flexibility is ???
>
>We also...<snip>
>
>I think by "structured" we are talking about two 
>aspects without really being clear about the 
>distinction: (1) do we allow or not allow an accounting 
>category 
>
In the above line I meant to say "...do we allow or not allow a 
budgeting category..."

>to be tied to accounts from more than one 
>branch of the account tree,
>
Others have either extended this (or incorrectly paraphrased this) as 
"...tied to accounts from more than one _type_ of account from the 
account tree."  That is to say, a budget category tied to an Expense 
account AND a Liability account.  That is not what I was proposing, I 
was just proposing that it be flexible enough to tie a budget category 
to multiple accounts (or "branches" is fine too) - my examples were all 
expense accounts.  Mixing account _types_ within a singe budget category 
would probably (in my opinion) be one step too hairy.  I think it would 
be difficult to understand/code/use.

The only way I could picture that working is if each budget category had 
sub-items for each of the major account types.  Actually, this might be 
"the right way" now that I think of it... your "Food" budget category 
would be delta of Assets -100 and Expenses +100, and you could either be 
lazy and just tie it to the top level Asset and Expense accounts, or you 
could be strict and tie it to the specific Asset:bankAccount where you 
plan to spend it from and the specific Expense:Food:Restaurants where 
you plan to spend it on.  But maybe this is just getting to be a full 
mimic of the accounting side?

Is this what people meant by this extension/paraphrase?

> (2) do we allow or not 
>allow changes to the budget in the middle of the 
>budgeting period.
>
>4.1.7 Versions are good!
>
>...<snip>
>




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