budgeting help / feature request

[Forest Bond]

Hi,

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 07:25:48PM -0500, spleen 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.

Like you, I started using GnuCash hoping to make use of the budget features but
found them to be suboptimal.  I have implemented a few reports that are in
current trunk:

 * Budget Balance Sheet
 * Budget Income Statement

These reports are similar to the existing Balance Sheet and Income Statement
reports, but use budget projections instead of actual data.  As they currently
exist, they are useful for evaluating whether a budget balances and meets your
savings and/or liability repayment requirements.

Additionally, I have a patch [1] that extends the Budget Income Statement report
to allow reporting for a single budget period.  This makes it possible to gauge
whether or not real income and expenses are in line with the budget.  In order
to do this, you must generate both a normal Income Statement and a Budget Income
Statement for the current budget period.  You can then compare those reports.

My plan is to further extend the Budget Income Statement so that it can also
show actual totals for the budget period.  This would provide a single report
that can be used to compare budget and actual income and expense totals for a
given budget period.  However, I've run into some limitations of some of the
reporting APIs that have caused a delay in implementation of this feature.

The reports I've created do make the budget system more useful, however, they
won't give you everything that you're looking for.  The Budget Balance Sheet and
Budget Income Statement reports cannot be used to determine whether or not you
have a cash flow issue.  Liability repayments are not expenses, so they do not
show up on the Budget Income Statement, but they can, of course, lead to cash
shortfalls.

Further, budgets themselves do not track the source of cash for liability
repayments or expenses, so account-specific cash flow problems would be
impossible to identify.

If someone were to create a Budget Cash Flow report of some kind, it could be
used to identify global cash shortfalls (if total money in is less than total
money out for a given budget period), but could not be used to tell if your
checking account will be overwithdrawn at any point over the course of the
budget.  It would still be useful, though.

If you need the level of granularity required to tell whether or not your
checking account will be overwithdrawn, you are probably better off using normal
accounts with real transactions dated in the future to model a budget.  I know
others have taken this route.

Would you consider trying out svn trunk to see if these reports address your
needs?

My patch [1] will likely be applied to trunk soon.  You may wish to apply it
locally in the mean time.

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570895

Thanks,
Forest
-- 
Forest Bond
http://www.alittletooquiet.net
http://www.pytagsfs.org
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