budgeting?

[Steve Romanow]

The way I do budgeting (rudimentery) is:

1) I have all budget line items in as transactions in my check register 
account with the date set to LDOM

2) Their check number is set to HOLD.

3) The Category for the transaction is for the real account i.e. "Auto:Fuel".

4) The description contains the Initial FDOM Budget amount.

5) As the money is spent through the month, I have a MTD report that shows the 
amount spent, I can decrement the budget transaction amount by the amount 
spent.

6) If I have to add additional funds because I underbudgeted, I just add it as 
text in the description so I will know to add more teh next month if the 
levels goin to stay. For example, "Auto:Fuel" budget might look like (140 + 
40 + 40) because I started with 140, then theis 2.00 a gallon gas had me 
re-allocate twice.

It works well for me, because the transactions dates are manually changed to 
+1 month at the end of the month.  The sum of the register balance + 
uncleared items will equal the banks balance also, so I can find errors 
pretty quickly.

Steve