Budgeting/pre-allocation procedure?

[David Harrison]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:26:48 -0600, Michael J. Barillier
<mbarilli at midsouth.rr.com> wrote:
> I've seen various threads related to aspects of budgeting in Gnucash
> but haven't seen anything concrete that I could implement.  Basically,
> I'd like to set aside funds in my checking account for upcoming bills,
> either known or estimated, so that if my wife or I look at the account
> balance we see what's available to be spent, not the actual balance.
> The best solution I've come up with is to create a separate asset
> account and transfer whatever I expect to spend on upcoming bills into
> that holding account, and when I pay the bills from the checking
> account I transfer back into the checking account to cover what I've
> written.  I'm wondering if someone hasn't come up with a more elegant
> or ``correct'' (from an accounting perspective) method that wouldn't
> be a tremendous PITA to implement?

I can't think of a better way of the top of my head, but reconciling
the bank account is going to be a real PITA since the bank account
will be the sum of two separate gnucash accounts.

>From an accounting perspective, there is no "correct" way of doing this.
-- 
David Harrison, BAccS, CGA