Budgeting Summary 1 - first draft

Matthew Vanecek mevanecek at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 8 21:20:15 CDT 2003


First off, what an excellent summary!

On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 10:13, Rick Ziegler wrote:
> 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.
> 

I'm wondering if being able to tie multiple budget categories to a
single account would help here.  If I have 3 savings goals, and all the
money for those goals resides in Assets:Savings, then each savings goal
budget category will want to tie to Asset:Savings.  The sum of the
budgeted amounts should equal the total delta in Asset:Savings for the
given period.  There are possible breakdowns, of course (e.g., if you
are short, how do you know in which category the shortage takes place?).

Perhaps it'd just be better to use Asset:Savings:Goal{1, 2, 3}
instead...

This is just a brainstorm thought--maybe good, maybe bad.
-- 
Matthew Vanecek
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me.
I'm always getting in the way of something...



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