Virtual savings accounts for rainy day accounting

[Eric Angell]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 13:46:26 -0600, Jeff Smith wrote:

> The question is: is this a good way to set up these 'virtual savings 
> accounts', or is there a better way?

It sounds like your plan is pretty close to Andrew's solution.  I
do something similar, but with a few key differences.  Let's
consider my accounts Bank:Savings:General and
Bank:Savings:Reserved (Bank:Savings is simply a placeholder
account).  Any time I make a "real" transaction involving the
savings account, the split goes to :General, and when I
reconcile, it is only with :General.  :Reserved exists solely so
there is a logical place for me to make transfers to my "virtual
savings accounts" as you put it.  Each transaction is for a
different "account", and they all have dates well into the
future.  Each month, or whenever I feel like changing the
allocation, I simply edit the existing transactions to change
their amounts.  If I want to start saving for a new category, say
expected taxes on a large stock sale, I'll create a new
transaction from :General to :Reserved and note something in the
description such as "Expected tax".  When I actually pay that
tax, I'll remove the transaction.  Some transactions such as
"Emergency Fund" will stay there forever though they may change
in amount from time to time as I spend money in emergency
situations or build the fund back up at each paycheck.

Note that this doesn't work with the Scheduled Transaction
system, as I don't believe there's any way to have it modify an
existing transaction at a specific date.  I like it because it's
really more just like setting aside some money temporarily, and I
don't want the transactions that create that effect to exist
later.  Accounting is a record of what happened with your money,
and budgeting is plan for what you intend to happen in the
future.  Seeing as how Gnucash doesn't have budgeting support
(yet?), I try to keep my budget-like fake transactions to a
minimum.

Note that Bank:Savings has the total value that the bank would
report if I had no unreconcilled transactions.  This is also the
same value as of the current date in :General, because all of the
fake budgeting transactions "occur" well in the future.  If I
want to see how much money I have available to spend, I look at
the future balance of :General.

HTH.

-E

-- 
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