Budget, expense issue

[Cheryl Wheeler]

Hi, David,

Well, I have such an account now; it's called Expenses:Unspecified. :-) 
But if I feel obsessive about it at some point, then I may research the 
two transactions *from over a decade ago* for proper categorization. 
After importing from Quicken, I did recategorize quite a few 
transactions, both in Unspecified and in some other accounts, but these 
didn't seem worth the effort involved.

When I originally mentioned a "proper fix", I was actually referring to 
my other book that has two root expense accounts, Expenses Currency1 and 
Expenses Currency2 (and similarly, Assets, Income, and Liabilities 
accounts). It seems reasonable to me as a user that, if I make a budget 
that only involves accounts in Currency1, then the budget tool should 
not be affected by the presence in the book of accounts in Currency2. Or 
more broadly, if my budget only includes accounts under root accounts 
Assets1, Income1, and Expenses1, then the existence of root accounts 
Assets2, Income2, and Expenses2 should not affect the budget tool. In my 
opinion.

   Cheryl


On 2015-10-31 12:34 PM, David T. wrote:
> Cheryl,
>
> With regard to the voided transaction: you can unvoid it, change it, and then re-void it.
>
> As to the other two, my personal solution (not according to any accountancy guidelines, since I Am Not An Accountant), is to have a specific expense account for these unspecified items. Mine is Expenses:Adjustment.
>
> Keep in mind that the Unspecified account is where GnuCash is going to put other entries it can’t figure out for you, so it is good to move the known oddities out of it.
>
> David
>
>> On Oct 31, 2015, at 11:51 AM, Cheryl Wheeler <c_wheeler_2002 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, David,
>>
>> I would have preferred to have done that, but one transaction was a voided transaction. It can't be edited at all in GnuCash -- I tried. The other two were from 2003 and 2004. I wasn't doing the books then, so it would have taken me some effort to figure out what the proper categorization should have been at that time. Given that I can't change the voided one at all, I decided not to spend a lot of time on the other two.
>>
>>   Cheryl
>>
>>
>> On 2015-10-31 11:13 AM, David T. wrote:
>>> Cheryl,
>>>
>>> The proper fix is to assign those Unspecified transactions to your preferred expense accounts, either at import time, or after. The Unspecified account is an expedient that GnuCash uses to get transactions into its double entry realm when the other end is not yet known.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>> On Oct 31, 2015, at 9:51 AM, Cheryl Wheeler <c_wheeler_2002 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Thanks, Matt. I did have a top-level "Unspecified" expense account automatically created during data import from Quicken. I don't want to change or delete the transactions in that account, so I edited "Unspecified" so that it is a sub-account of "Expenses". The budget summary works now, cool.
>>>>
>>>> I think a proper fix would be valuable. I have a different set of books where I have two sets of Assets, Liabilities, Expenses, etc., because I work in two different currencies. I don't use the budgeting tool there (yet), but it would be nice if the tool worked as long as all of the accounts in the budget are in the same currency.
>>>>
>>>>    Cheryl
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 2015-10-31 1:14 AM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
>>>>> Message: 7
>>>>> Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2015 09:53:06 +1100
>>>>> From: "Matt Graham" <matt_graham2001 at hotmail.com>
>>>>> To: <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>, <zalethon at gmail.com>,
>>>>> 	<clanlaw at gmail.com>, <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
>>>>> Subject: Budget Expense Issue
>>>>> Message-ID: <BAY180-DS513F0EC475CB1CAFE2C378F2F0 at phx.gbl>
>>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
>>>>> 	reply-type=original
>>>>>
>>>>> G'day,
>>>>>
>>>>> The budget expense issue sounds like bug 742352,
>>>>> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742352
>>>>>
>>>>> As I state in there, make sure you only have ONE root expense account.
>>>>> Gnucash will not work properly in calculating the totals for the budgets if
>>>>> you have more than one root expense, income, asset or liability account.
>>>>> During imports, or if you don't balance your transactions the program often
>>>>> creates expense accounts called "Unspecified" that are not within the main
>>>>> "Expenses" tree. As a result this bug can randomly appear after you do an
>>>>> import or split transaction. Not a big deal - just delete the offending
>>>>> account, change its type to "Bank" or something like that, or move it to
>>>>> have the main "Expenses" account as its parent. Easy work around!
>>>>>
>>>>> I am still working on improving the code so that we can get rid of this
>>>>> issue. Since I haven't programmed using the gtk much, it is slow going!
>>>>>
>>>>> Hope this helps,
>>>>>
>>>>> Matt
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