Fw: Enquiry about budgets

[Dennis Muhlestein]

Fiona - software wrote:
> It was suggested that I forward this email onto your group by John Carter to help with my enquiries.  He has been very quick in responding to my queries but hightlighted that is not a developer, only a user.
> 

Your comments and screenshot reminded me about everything I didn't like 
about Quicken.  I used Quicken for probably 8 years and recently 
switched to GnuCash because I'm no longer willing to run Quicken in a 
virtual machine and GnuCash has an acceptable online banking implementation.

Actually, though, I like GnuCash better than Quicken anyway because of 
it's double entry accounting system.  I chose to implement budgets with 
my own set of accounts instead of using the built in budgeting tool. 
This lets me do all the things you talked about.  For instance, I can have

Expenses:
   Fuel
     Car
     Truck
     Van

Budget:
   Fuel

Where my fuel budget is for all the fuel accounts.

I've set up what is sometimes referred to a 0-based budget system.  It 
very similar in concept to what mvelopes.com does.  There is added 
overhead to record your expenses since you also need to record which 
budget account you are spending at the same time but for me at least, 
the overhead is extremely worth the benefit I get by always being able 
to see exactly how much money I have in a given budget account without 
needing to run a report.

Anyhow, I currently have this article on my blog and haven't got around 
to getting it transferred over to the gnucash wiki yet.

http://allmybrain.com/2008/12/15/better-budgeting-with-gnucash/

-Dennis