Budgets - "Budget Transactions"

[Dale Alspach]

I was not thinking of routine regular transactions so much. 

Suppose that you need to accumulate funds for a $500 vacation expense
that will occur in June.  You decide to set aside $100 for each month
Jan. - May. You could alter your account tree and split the funds in your
checking account into a current expense account and a vacation account.
Each month you would then transfer $100 into the vacation account. Suppose
you have several similar items, e.g., homeowner's insurance, property
taxes, an annual maintenance fee.  These all have different lump sum
payment dates. Do you want to create separate subaccounts for each lump
sum payment? You could create one subaccount, e.g., restricted funds,
and place all of these partial payments into this one subaccount. Then
you would effectively budget what must be in this asset account each
month. Of course when you balance your checking account you have to
remember to have gnucash use all of the subaccounts.

If you have budget transactions, for the vacation you
encumber the $100 additional each month Jan.-May and insert a future budget
transaction in June that actually represents the expense. You would do a
similar thing for each such expense. 

The budget transaction allows you to
shift the timing of an expense for budgeting purposes but keeps the
transaction accounts as an accurate picture of the current state of the
finances. 

Assuming that the creation and deletion of encumbrances is not
too painful, a user could do "what if" analysis in gnucash as part of the
process of creating or revising a budget.

Dale