Ratio of savings to expenses

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Rob Cussons wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm interested in outputting on a monthly basis the ratio of money I'm
>saving in certain asset accounts to my income from certain income accounts.
>Is there an easy way to output this using the reports feature in Gnucash?
>
>  
>
Insufficient (you need to take more into account).

Of course it is possible you don't have any liability accounts to to be 
considered, but in the general case there would be. So it would be the 
NET changes you would need to be taking into account. Nor would it be 
just certain income accounts ignoring all other possible ones and 
ignoring expenses.

Suppose you ran the usual reports for an accounting period, Balance 
Reports for the beginning and end of the period and an Income Statement 
for the interval. The data from those would allow you to prepare a 
report showing the deltas and let you compute that ratio.

Michael

PS: In theory, as long as your chart of accounts remained fixed, by 
exporting all the way to spreadsheets you could automate the 
calculations as you first describe as what you want. But I would 
strongly recommend against that since:
1) The chart of accounts could change (accounts added, removed, merged, 
etc.)
2) It takes a human eye to spot unusual events. For example, if you had 
a large windfall income amount (in some OTHER income category) you might 
have had a huge change in the specified asset account(a) but not related 
to the specific income account(s). To be honest, I don't completely 
understand the "specific" account thing as money is fungible << you 
can't say which dollar of income represents which dollar in a savings 
account, etc.>>