Budget Editor Entry

Russell Mercer rmercer206 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 15 07:50:41 EDT 2015


Hi All,

I am trying to create a budget in Gnucash.  Let me rephrase that, I have
created a budget in Gnucash and am attempting to enter budget amounts that
will give me accurate results when I run Budget reports based off what I
have entered.

Here are the problems that I am running into:

In expense entries, when you select the button to estimate values using
amounts from previous years, it enters all of these as negative numbers.
When you estimate values for income entries, they enter as positive
numbers.  I looked through the documentation and concepts guide, and
honestly, there isn't any detail in there about budget entries.  I figured
great, let's run a report to test this out.

The first report that I ran was a Budget Barchart report.  This creates a
barchart of budget vs actual values for each category.  There was an
immediate problem.  All of the budget entries that I put in as negative,
showed as negative in the barchart, below zero.  All of the actual values
showed as positive values.

The next report that I ran was the Budget Income Statement.  This simply
shows all Income and Expense categories from your budget, then provides a
Net Income calculation at the end.  The Net Income is calculated as Total
Income - Total Expense.  As mentioned above, all Income entries showed as
Positive Numbers.  All Expense entries, automatically entered by the
Estimate button, showed as Negative Numbers.  The problem showed up in the
Net Income total, which ended up as a higher number because when you
subtract a negative number, it makes a positive, and thus the Income and
Expense entries were added together.

The last report that I ran was the Budget Report.  This lists the Budget
and Actual values for each period in the budget.  In this report, the
Budget values were shown in Black.  If they were negative, they were shown
with parentheses, like this:  $(2000.00).  The Actual values were shown as
Black if they were positive values, like this:  $2000.00, or in red with
parentheses $(2000.00).  All Budget Expense entries were shown as negative,
and all Actual Expense entries were shown as negative as well.

Finally, a couple of comments about the Budget Editor:
1.  The four lines at the bottom:  Income, Expenses, Transfers, and Total,
all showed 0.00 for each budget period, no matter what values were entered
in the categories above.  They are not even mentioned in the documentation,
but they don't seem to be editable, so it seemed they should auto-calculate.
2.  The Budget Editor runs extremely slowly.  I'm running on a decent
windows machine with an i5 processor.  Gnucash in general runs pretty
snappily, and I have no complaints.  When I started using the budget
editor, it completely slowed down the entire program.

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong.  I looked at the help and at the
concepts guide.  I also looked at the wiki entry for budgets.  I also
searched the mailing list for the past few years.  Basically, I came up
empty.  It seems odd to me that the programmed behavior of the budget
editor is contradicted by different Budget reports, which also contradict
each other in their behavior.

If anyone has any insight into this, I would really appreciate it.  I saw
an email from a couple years back questioning why someone would use the
budget functionality for monthly recurring costs, and I hope I don't get a
similar response this time.  Budgeting is an integral part of financial
management, and it really should work.  I am trying to use it because it
makes more sense and should theoretically take less time to do a budget in
Gnucash, than to export all the values to Excel for each category and time
period, and get it to work there.
Again, any assistance would be appreciated.

To the devs who check this list, thanks for your time and effort, Gnucash
is a great product!

Russell


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