budget report

[Mike or Penny Novack]

David T. wrote:

>Mike--
>
>I imagine that Joe is using the budget reports to track income and expenses because that report is the best one he could find to achieve his goal: seeing monthly values of income and expenses over time. 
>
>He is using the best tool available in Gnucash.
>
>  
>
The "Income Statement" allows you to set whatever beginning and ending 
dates you wish. So if you wanted to track income and expenses on a 
monthly basis you'd run it once a month with starting date the first of 
the month and ending date the last.

Of course the gnucash bar would get overly crowded if you left all these 
reports open, so after running the report for a month you'd probably 
want to export it to a suitably named directory, aka "file folder"  
(like "monthly income and expenses") with each file renamed for its date 
interval (say adding the Julian date of the end of the month to the name).

The reason that I said not to use the budget report for this is that a 
budget report (by itself) shows only PLANNED income and expenses, not 
what actually happened. Of course frequently budget reports provide an 
option to show deltas (the differences between planned and actuals). 
That feature is of more use in organizational accounting where the 
budget often represents AUTHORIZED expenses on a line item basis. In 
personal bookkeeping one is generally concerned that total expenses 
don't exceed a budgeted amount but you are allowed to freely substitute 
and don't care that no line item individually exceeds authorization.

Michael