doing budgeting/escrow within checking account

[Greg Troxel]

I did something a bit like this in a homegrown double-entry accounting
program that I wrote in Scheme (no, you do not want to use that code -
transactions are written in s-expressions and it's a once/month batch
job).

I was not worried about cash flow, but about tracking long-term
expenditures.  So I did not attempt to keep track of how much of the
cash in a checking account was allocated to various categories.  So what
I am describing probably does not do what you want, but it may be
adaptable.

In addition to the regular equity account, I had a number of other
equity accounts, named for various purposes.  For discussion I'll talk
about only one that I'll call "toys".  Every month, I had a journal
entry that moved $100 from equity-main to equity-toys.  Then, during the
month I accumulated expenses as normal, with toy expenses going against
the expense-toys account.  During month-end close, I posted closing
entries to expense-toys, but instead of a normal closing entry against
the main equity account, this one was linked to go against the
equity-toys account.

So, the condition of the equity-toys account shows the unclosed balance,
and that net of expense-toys shows the available balance.  Where the
money is, that's another story, but this effectively records the amount
of net assets that have been allocated to toys.

It should in theory be relatively easy to make a report that shows such
available balances.