Monthly budgeting for non-monthly expenses

[Randy Orrison]

Dan Werner wrote:
> Hi, I've been using basic functionality in gnucash for a while, and
> I'd like to start getting more out of it.  A specific thing I've been
> wondering about is: how do you budget for something monthly that you
> only pay for once or twice a year?
>   
I use a real savings account (i.e. at the bank - it gets better interest 
than my checking account) for exactly this, using gnucash's subaccounts 
to keep track of what portion of the account is for which purpose.  I 
have a scheduled monthy transfer in gnucash from my checking account 
(shortly after payday) to the various sub-accounts in the savings 
account (it's a big split), which matches a transfer from my checking 
account to the savings account.  It's a bit of a pain to reconcile (the 
bank statement of course shows the total of the transfer, but gnucash 
only shows the individual splits, not the total), and has to be set up 
manually (I've set the Description field for each subaccount to show the 
annual total target and montly deposit), but it works great.

Even if you weren't going to use a separate savings account, you could 
experiment with using subaccounts of your checking account.  Then you 
could see the available balance of your checking account, and the total 
would show the real (bank) balance.

Randy