Tracking Money in Savings Account

[Wayne Bird]

James,

Thanks for the example!  This is very helpful, but again, I don't want to force GnuCash into being an envelope system, if there is a better way.  Or at least my goal is to learn as much as I can about the "standard" method.  

Now that said, I find it interesting that under the Accounts tab the checking acct total is $1,813.00, but when I open the checking account I have a balance of $1,400.  I would imagine this is because the Accounts tab is giving the overall total (subaccounts included).  Whereas, when you go into the checking account, it's only showing the total for that particular account (no subaccounts included).  I can see how this can get ugly.  But this will be the case any time there's a subaccount in checking.  Yes, balancing can be interesting.  I don't remember who it was, but someone posted that their checking account was only a place holder for all their subaccounts.  I wonder how that works for balancing?

Wayne




Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:58:14 -0800
From: fireflys_98 at yahoo.com
Subject: RE: Tracking Money in Savings Account
To: brakhane at googlemail.com; wrbird at hotmail.com
CC: adardis at gmail.com; derek at ihtfp.com; warlord at mit.edu; gnucash-user at gnucash.org

So attached is my stupidly simple sample of what I think an envelope system could be.

Note, I've not made this very detailed, doesn't include worrying too much about pay, it's just net income (not splitting to savings accounts, or anything else)

I moved $100 into the Electric Envelope ready to pay a bill (that was then paid)
I moved $100 into Phone Envelope ready to pay the phone bill, it's setup to pay in a few days time.
I moved $100 into my envelope for buying something that I wanted to save up for, obviously not buying anything with it yet, so it's just sitting there.

The complex bit, as far as I'm concerned is going to be balancing the accounts, since you'll have a bunch of splits that the bank doesn't have.

- James Duerr



E-mail: FireFlys_98 at yahoo.com

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