Budgets - Hiding Accounts Not of Interest

[DaveC49]

Hi Matt,
>From an accounting perspective a budget would normally be something against
which you measure current performance against your performance expectations.
I would have thought that the budget accounts should match reasonably
closely the account tree. It may not be as detailed as the full account tree
and information may be only entered at a header level rather than at each
branch level.

Providing a totally separate budget account tree is likely to hamper the
ability to use a budget as a measurement tool as you would then have to
provide a mapping of one tree structure into the other.  The process of
hiding accounts is as I understand it, a display control ( one of the
developers may be better able to clarify this). If an account exists it can
be used to accumulate data whether hidden or not and its data should be
reflected and measured against a budget value somewhere.

Another approach would perhaps be the ability to flag branches in the
account tree as including budget data or not ( for example accounts which
record business transactions in progress but would be expected to have zero
balances at EOY. If a branch is flagged then all parent branches would be
included in a budget by definition. If the flagged level is a
header/placeholder account and there are no flagged sub-accounts then budget
information for that header account  would be compared with the sum of the
current data for the unflagged sub accounts. This would also allow the
possibility of breaking an initial budget down further if required by
unflagging the header account, flagging the sub-accounts and splitting the
header account budget value appropriately between the sub accounts.

Similarly if less detail is required then the sub-accounts could be
unflagged, and existing budget data coalesced into the header account.  

Where an item like share income/expenses may affect accounts in both income
and expense categories in a related manner specialised tools could be
developed to enter the information once and enter it into the appropriate
account.
Another possibility would be to create links between income and expense
categories so that the budget data could be summarised at the report level
rather than at the accounting tree level under those linked categories so
that projected income and expense for a category of account would be
presented in a linked manner rather than in separate income and expense
sections.

Accountants generally do arrange account trees with matching income expense
sections in any case and in most cases the difference between income and
expense compared with what is budgeted, i.e. the actual vs expected profit
for an activity is of major interest.

Budget data could then be attached to/incorporated into the account data
using key-value pairs with an accounting period specification as the key and
amount as the value. This may be necessary for some businesses which may
have monthly, quarterly or semiannual budgeting and reporting requirements
or where one may want to establish performance at a finer time interval than
annual, e.g. where there are significant seasonal variations in business
activity across various activities. I'm pleading for non hard coding of
budgeting periods in this case with maximum flexibility and the ability to
match accounting practice and the variations that will be encountered there.



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