Budgets - Use of artificial "wrapper" budget accounts

Dale Alspach alspach at math.okstate.edu
Thu Dec 31 11:59:35 EST 2015


Matt,

What you are suggesting is that if one wants to combine accounts for
budgeting only one must alter the transaction accounts tree to match. From
my point of view there should be some independence between the two tree
structures. The purpose of the structure of the budget and the actual
accounting may be different.

1. If there is only one budget, what you are suggesting can be done but it
may impose an unnatural structure on the transaction account tree. Once you
add these accounts they show up in every report. For example there may be
several expense accounts over which I have little or no discretion, e.g.,
utilities and taxes. For budgeting purposes  I may want to call this fixed
overhead. However, for other purposes grouping taxes and utilities together
makes no sense.

If there are multiple budgets, with overlapping transaction accounts, what
you are suggesting is impractical or impossible.

2. These new accounts will (should) never have any actual transactions.
Unless they provide conceptual structure, they are just clutter from the
transaction side. They impact the listings, the choices of account when
entering a transaction (how many letters must be typed to choose an
account), etc.

3. Philosophically I believe software should be as flexible as possible so
that users may use it for things or in ways that the designer or
programmer never considered. I have tried to imagine budgeting scenarios
but I have zero experience with accounting outside of the U.S.A. I believe
the addition of purely budgeting accounts provides great flexibility. The
questions for the developers are different. I have not done coding for a
very long time and know little of the inner structure of gnucash software, so
the developers/maintainers have to decide whether this should be done.

Dale


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