Budgeting features

[Roberto Hernandez]

On Jan 19, 2008 11:18 PM, Andrew Sackville-West
<andrew at swclan.homelinux.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 10:31:41PM +0100, Roberto Hernandez wrote:
> I'm not sure what the problem is. If you budget for this month's
> paycheck as if it came in next month, then surely next month's
> paycheck will be budgeted for the following month. Unless you have a
> wildly fluctuating paycheck, I don't see what difference it makes
> which month it gets accounted in. Do you follow? If it's one paycheck
> per month, it doesn't really matter whether it goes in this month or
> next month so long as it's consistent.

The paycheck is just one example of the transactions I mentioned that
happen just before/after the budget month. Doing it that way has
worked for me so far. I guess the question boils down to whether I
need to adapt my budgeting to the software or vice-versa.

> > One option would be to record the transaction as though it happened at
> > the beginning of the following month, but that would get pretty messy
> > for reconciling bank statements.
>
> Actually, this is not a bad solution and it probably wouldn't matter
> for reconciling. Pushing the date up a few days doesn't magically make
> it unreconcilable.

But it does make it a dirty fix. It means there are two records that
don't match (my accounting and the bank statement).

Again, I'm no expert in accounting, but having two dates for each
transaction doesn't seem like a far fetched solution. All my bank /
credit card statements include two dates, so it can't be an all-wrong
approach.

Roberto