Ratio of savings to expenses

[Rob Cussons]

Hi Michael,

thanks very much for your help.

I'm not sure I understand your comment of "Insufficient". I'm interested in
calculating my savings to income ratio as per:
http://tinyurl.com/79jy62q
which requires the following calculation:
(savings each month including pension contributions by myself and employer
and company share schemes) / (gross income - (income tax + NI) + employer's
pension contributions)

I would like to be able to track how this changes on a monthly basis with
relatively little effort, although I understand your point about black
boxes. Is a standard report plus manually extracting the data the only way
to do this or can I customise a report somehow to achieve this?

Many thanks for your help!


On 22 November 2014 at 14:02, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> 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.>>
>