Budgets - Use of artificial "wrapper" budget accounts

[Matt Graham]

Hi Again Dale, I hope you wont get sick of me - your points/ideas strike at 
the very heart of accounting & how budgeting should/will get done! I'll try 
to ask questions one by one, rather than putting them all in. This is 
because you have a lot of points here, and I think the emails would get too 
long if I tried to question to understand it all at once.

Your first point is regarding allowing the creation of new types of accounts 
for budgeting only. If I understand correctly, it sounds like you are 
interested in simply wrapping up existing accounts under one tree - not 
creating a virtual account that doesn't exist. But I'm confused as to why 
you need changes to current Gnucash budgets to do this.
Taking your examples:
Two separate income accounts for user's salary and for spouse's salary (as 
you should have if they are separate incomes). The way I understand this 
kind of thing is with the following type of account structure:

Income:
    Salary:
        User Salary Account
        Spouse Salary Account
    Rental Income
        Rental Property 1 Income Account
        Rental Property 2 Income Account
    Shares Income

So your salary accounts are two separate sub-accounts of the account 
"Salary" which is itself a sub-account of the core "Income" account. Hence 
if you only wanted to budget for overall "Salary" from you both (rather than 
budget your salaries separately) you would enter the appropriate amount in 
the "Salary" account of the budget gui and not touch the sub accounts for 
"user" and "spouse".

Similar story for Expenses. From the core expense account you could have a 
'utilities' expenses account which groups the various accounts for water, 
sewerage, electricity, gas etc etc. That way you could do transactions by 
the sub accounts (water, sewerage, electricity etc etc), but budget by the 
utilities account.

Is there a situation where this would not work? Or a situation where it is 
not convenient to have this structure?

Note that you need to do one or the other - budget by the root account, or 
budget by its children. E.g. you can't set $100 to "Water" sub account, then 
put $400 in "utilities" account expecting them to group to be $500 total for 
utilities. If an account has a budget value entered there, then the colour 
changes from grey to black and all sub account values are ignored. This was 
a purposeful design decision made long before I joined the project (although 
it makes sense from a programmer perspective). Please advise if you think it 
is bad from a user perspective!

Once we have cleared this up, I'll come back to all of your other stuff! 
Keep up the great ideas/suggestions everyone!

cheers,

Matt