Budgeting features

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 12:29:03AM +0100, Roberto Hernandez wrote:
> 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.

I'd say that's a fair assessment.

> 
> > > 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).

no different than when you write a check on 1/1/08 and it clears the
bank on 1/15/08 because the recipient sat on it for a few days. Do you
record the txn for the date written or the date cleared? In my humble
opinion, there is nothing wrong with fudging the dates a little so
long as you are not doing it to avoid some tax or something like
that. Heck businesses do it all the time and call it accrual
accounting. 

> 
> 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.

I'm not trying to argue one way or the other just provide some
thoughts. 

A
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