budgeting help / feature request

[Yawar Amin]

Hi,

To experiment with different scenarios, I would still go for Excel (or any
spreadsheet). But to build up a history of your daily expenses, bills and
savings, so that you get a good picture of where your money is going,
Gnucash is really worth the couple of hours it takes to set up properly.

One thing that Gnucash can do very well for you is give you the future
balance of your chequing account, minus all your expenses, so that you don't
overspend and go into overdraft by mistake. Simply enter transactions with
dates in the future, and Gnucash sets them apart with a blue line from
current and past transactions, and tells you your calculated future balance.
I do this quite a bit to see how much wiggle room I have after paying all my
bills and socking away money into my savings accounts.

By the way, it seems that K = 2C + 2F - J. Unless I'm missing something?

Hope this helps

Yawar

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 7:25 PM, spleen <spleen42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just started using GnuCash recently and I would like to keep track of my
> budget like this:
>
> A salary - B deductions = C biweekly income
> D living expenses + E savings = F biweekly expenses
> G rent + H bills + I student loans = J monthly expenses
> function(C, F, J) = K monthly debt reduction payments
>
> Please note that attempting to maintain a budget is the reason I started
> using GnuCash. Also note that these are meta categories and do not directly
> correspond to my account hierarchy.
>
> The primary purpose of my budget is to ensure that my chequing account
> never
> has an overdraft, so my balance must be calculated at all times. The
> secondary purpose is to be able to experiment with the values of the
> variables and have all the other values recalculated as I play with them in
> an attempt to balance the values of D and K to my liking.
>
> If it's possible to do this with GnuCash version 2.2.8, please direct me to
> the appropriate section of the documentation. I can try to remember how to
> write scheme code if necessary. Otherwise, I would like to submit a feature
> request. I do not find the current implementation of the budgeting feature
> very useful.
>
> Thanks,
> spleen
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