Budgets - Hiding Accounts Not of Interest & Grouping Budget Accounts

[Bill Starrs]

Matt, 

I agree.  Budget groupings should not be used in transactions and only
exist as collectors of real accounts.  In many cases they may not be
necessary if the regular account heirarchy works (i.e. Gas, Internet,
Electric all under the Utilities umbrella).  But if a user wants to
budget at the level of "Home Expenses", he/she may want to include
utilities, and homeowner's insurance, and property taxes, and any
shopping trips to the hardware store to fix the sink.

In the main account tree, you are forced to decide one and only one way to
divide things: i.e. Should I have an Insurance account with Auto, Home,
Life, etc?  Or should Auto, Home, Life be accounts each with an
Insurance sub-account?  Hard to argue for a "best" method but having
this feature in budgeting makes up for whatever inefficiencies exist in
the account heirarchy... this does not mean necessarily that the account
heirarchy is bad, just limiting.

As long as we consider budgeting to be a read-only, reporting layer
above the core transactional data, I think we can make the concepts
clear in the docs.

Happy New Year!

Bill


On Fri, Jan 01, 2016 at 05:15:03PM +1100, Matt Graham wrote:
> Hi Guys, You have definitely convinced me on the selecting of accounts to
> budget for (and have the program not display those that the user doesn't
> want to budget for). Sounds like it would be a useful feature for people to
> have available.
> 
> I'm also convinced we need *something* to allow users to group accounts in a
> budget separately from the normal account hierarchy. Having said that, we'll
> need to ensure that the tut & concept guide and help manuals etc to ensure
> users don't try to use this feature to make up for a bad account
> hierarchy....
> 
> So my basic understanding is that in a budget created by the user they would
> be able to outline a budget account tree that can be completely separate
> from the main account tree. Every account selected to be included in the
> budget must be used somewhere in this tree and can only be present once in
> the tree.
> 
> So for example, even if our main account tree has our shares income under
> the income branch, and shares expenses under the root expense branch, the
> user can move it around  in the budget view to have a "Shares" root that has
> everything for shares under the one branch of the budget... The "Shares"
> root "account" does not exist in the account tree - it is only present
> within the budget (so as Dale said, you can't use them in transactions)
> 
> Let me know if I have misunderstood (or you can see problems with this
> approach)!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Matt
>