Budgeting Summary 1 - first draft

Darin Willits darin at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Sep 9 13:03:15 CDT 2003


First off, I have to agree... a truly excellent summary!  Thanks
Stewart! 

> Indeed, I believe tying multiple categories to a single account would
> help here.  What I went on to propose was a way to implement this within
> the proposed framework. 
> 
> Here it is again, a little more fleshed out this time:
>   
> One could create categories ( implemented like sub-accounts in the
> alternate hierarchy ) _under_ the asset account where the funds are
> being held.  This is similar to the way people currently use gnucash
> accounts do a budget, however instead of creating false transactions to
> fund these categories, we instead associate 'funding rules' with them.
> 
> Two such rules to compute the current category balance might be:
> 
> 1)   Distribute a percentage of the asset account deltas to each
> category.  For instance: if there is one $1000 deposit in the A:savings
> during the period, 20% is put into the truck category, and 80% to the
> retirement category.
> 
> 2)   A priority system: 100% of the deltas in the asset account go
> towards my highest priority ( truck ), until the goal for the period is
> reached.  Then the 2nd priority category is funded, and so on.
> 
> The Asset account would need to have the following information
> associated with it:
> 

I like this idea, and I agree that it could solve the problem of
multiple savings goals residing in one physical account.  But I wonder
if we aren't trying to solve too much within the budgeting
architecture.  

To me a savings goal is more of an *actual* account than a budget
category.  Every month I will want to transfer $X from my
Assets:Chequing Account into my savings goal account.  This way I can
see exactly where my savings goal is at any given point in time.  Using
the method described here:
http://www.gnucash.org/gnucash-devel/March-2000/msg00529.php3
I can even ensure that the transactions in my Assests:Chequing Account
match my bank statements.

To be certain you would have a budget category associated with your
saving goal so that you could budget and track your contributions to
your savings goal.  But the savings goal itself will be modelled as a
separate entity (much like an account).

I guess where I am going with all this is the suggestion that we not try
to do everything within the budget.  Maybe we need another abstraction
within gnucash to handle the concept of a savings goal?  Maybe a new
account type and some nice GUI's to set them up?

I think that savings goals are sufficiently complex to warrant their own
discussion.


Cheers,

Darin





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