Budgets - how does the community want to use them?

[Dale Alspach]

Here are a few thoughts on the budget implementation.

The current spreadsheet view is not very useful to me after the budget is
made. One reason is that I have a fairly large number of accounts. As
others have mentioned it would be helpful to remove some accounts from the
view. Another item that was mentioned in the history is that sometimes
budget categories are not identical to the categories needed for
transactions.

Below I have described a design suggestion. I know little of the inner
workings of gnucash so some parts may be impractical. Also it is unclear
what the degree of integration should/can be between the budget and the
actual transaction interface. I did try to keep things within what I
think are the tools and paradigms already in gnucash in the hope that
large amounts of new code would not be needed.


1. Allow the creation of new types of accounts for budgeting only. A budget
account would be a container for several existing gnucash transaction
accounts. Some might be for default sides of transactions to allow for
balancing of a budget and comparison with actuals. As an example a user may
have separate income accounts for the user's salary and spouse's salary,
but for budgeting purpose wants to use a combined account, Salary. Or a
user may combine natural gas, electric, water, sewer and trash into a
single utilities budget account.

2. Allow creation of budget transactions. Budget transactions could involve
budget accounts or transaction accounts. These would be for anticipated
actual transactions. These would resemble scheduled transactions but would
not require an exact date but only a budget interval, e.g., the month or
the quarter. The purpose would be to encumber funds for use in cash flow
forecasts and possibly to provide some enforcement of budget limits.

3. Provide a budget setup wizard to help with first time creation of a
budget. This might provide a set of generic budget accounts and might have
a few modes of operation: novice, intermediate, advanced. Levels of
automation and detail would be adjusted accordingly.

a. The wizard would first help the user decide which accounts are
actually used in the budget and how to group some accounts together
in budget accounts. I suggest that this should by consider types of
accounts. First income accounts, then expense accounts, etc.

b. Next the wizard would help setting the actual budget ammounts. This
could incorporate the current use of past actuals, copying the same amount
to each budget interval, e.g., clothing $300 each month for 2016. Perhaps
it could include some ability to handle simple formulas, e.g., a starting
amount and fixed or percentage change. If scheduled transactions exist, the
wizard might show the user what amounts are already predicted based on the
scheduled transactions.

c. Finally the wizard might show something like the currect spreadsheet view so
that the user can review everything.

4. First a digression. One issue I have with certain parts of gnucash is the
ambivalence about the relationship between an account and subaccounts. In
some other financial software that I have used, if a subaccount B (child)
is created for an account A (parent), a default subaccount A-Other also exists
implicitly. Whenever the subaccounts for account A are expanded, the
subaccount A-Other appears and holds the transactions that have not
been refined to a lower level. This way in reports and other displays
the amounts shown for account A are always totals for all transactions
in its subaccounts including A-Other.

I bring this up here because the spreadsheet view of the budget is
some ways unintuitive to me. 

One reason is that though it appears to be a spreadsheet, it
is actually just an editable static report.
Changing a budget item in a subaccount
does not update the budget for the parent. That being the case what is the
budget for the parent supposed to be: a total for all tranactions or what I
called A-Other above?
The same issue exists for the Income, Expense, Transfers and Totals at the
bottom of the spreadsheet. I would prefer that parent account budgets
be computed from subaccounts and Other. This has the benefit that
collapsing parts of the account tree only hides detail.

A second reason is that there is no way that I have found to move around
the spreadsheet except by using the mouse. I expected Tab to move right and
the up and down arrow keys to move to the corresponding entry. 

Third the copying from actual does not work for investment accounts. It
seems to be copying shares instead of currency equivalents.

5. At this point the budget is essentially operational. The user should
be given a way to add budget transactions. For example the user initially
may have only really budgeted income and expenses. The budget or a cash
flow forecast shows difficulty ahead. The users enters a transaction to
transfer funds at an appropriate time from an asset or credit line into
a budget account that covers the shortfall for cash flow. The user also
adds transactions that encumber funds for future transactions. A wizard
might do this automatically for all scheduled transactions.

There is an issue here that would need to be addressed. The budget
transactions are not real but encumbrances need to be dealt with. If there
is no interaction between the the budget and the transaction interface,
there is no way to replace an encumbrance with the actual it represents.
Perhaps there could be some kind of "show encumbrances" toggle in the
transaction interface which would allow the user to choose an encumbrance
as a template for a real transaction. After the encumbrance is updated
with the correct actual amounts, any budget accounts are replaced by
transaction accounts, and the user tries to save the transaction, the
interface could query the user as to whether to release (delete) the
encumbrance that was used as a template.  Budget versions of scheduled
transactions that were entered by the wizard might be able to be handled
automatically.  

6. For users who need more enforcement of the budget,
it might be possible to quickly check at each transaction save whether
the transaction breaks the budget, e.g., an expense in the transaction
plus recorded actuals plus encumbrances exceeds the budgeted amount
for the account or a real or budget parent. If it does, there could be
two levels of response: soft and hard. Soft response could be a pop-up
warning and a flag (by color or something) in a budget view which includes
the account. Hard could be to return the transaction to edit status and
pop-up a message or color the offending entries in the transaction.
One could also look at providing warning thresholds, e.g., after saving a
transaction a warning is given that 90% of the budget for account X is
committed.

7. For reports and views the user should have good control over the level
of detail.  I would like to have a report or view that shows for each
budgeted account columns budget, actual, difference for the subperiod
(month), the budget, actual, and difference for the period to date and
the budget for the total period (year).

I hope this gives enough of a sketch that others can think about how this
could (not) work, point out issues, suggest improvements, etc. If clarification
is needed, let me know.  Those on the development side might be able to say
what trouble implementing things like #6 would be.

Dale