Virtual accounts

[Wolfgang Schnerring]

Hello,

I was delighted to read Stewart Wright's proposal of virtual accounts
for budgeting[1]. This sounds *exactly* like the way I'd want to
approach budgeting. Briefly put, virtual accounts allow you to
"earmark" money for certain purposes (e. g., car, food,
entertainment), while it still is regarded as if it were sitting in
its original account (so this earmarking does not interfere with the
total balance or the reconciliation of the original account).
This provides an additional view on transactions besides their actual
participants (checking account, purse, employer, coffee shop), namely
their intended purpose (fun, food, car, etc.), and thus makes it very
straightforward to track one's spending and/or reserve money ahed of
time according to categories/purposes.

I realize that this was quite a few years ago, but it seems
to me that GnuCash still doesn't have any functionality to allow for
this kind of budeting. This puzzles me, since there were
implementation attempts at the time, and GnuCash nowadays has some
kind of budget functionality, although I don't see any connection to
the proposal at all. (Am I missing something here?)
I've dug through the mailing list archives surrounding the insightful
"Let's decide what we want!" thread[2] and tried to figure out how the
story ended, but failed to find a conclusive answer.
Another, more recent thread[3] also seems to have ended without a
clear conclusion.

So please allow me to ask: Is there currently (GnuCash v2.2.x) a way
to do budgeting in this manner?

Thanks for your help,
Wolfgang

[1] http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~swright/papers/gnucash/Budgeting_SVW.pdf
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.gnucash.user/8148
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.gnucash.user/19587