Making sense of budgets in GnuCash - totally confused

Cheryl Wheeler c_wheeler_2002 at yahoo.ca
Fri Mar 4 21:17:57 EST 2016


With respect to the budget totals, do you have more than one top-level 
Expense account? If you do, can you change the type of one of them 
(e.g., to Bank) or delete one or merge them into just one Expense 
account? The budgeting feature assumes that there is only one and does 
not work if there are multiples (or so I was told when I asked a similar 
question a few months back).

I'm not sure whether this also applies to top-level Asset and 
Liabilities accounts, but it may.


On 2016-03-04 8:02 PM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
> Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 01:17:23 +0000
> From: Richard Walker<trustmeimanengineer at gmail.com>
> To:gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Making sense of budgets in GnuCash - totally confused
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAJh+dUBXLdxKvAZg6QM17Ont1uEcxgcArZ_Yp_rzMT=n4OE0HA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi there,
>
> I've been using GnuCash for a several years, but have just started trying
> to use the budget tool.
>
> My goal is simple - I know approximately what money I'm expecting to come
> in and go out, and I want to estimate what the balance will be in future
> months. I've done this separately in a spreadsheet and I know what numbers
> I'm expecting.
>
> I've read the budgeting documentation
> <http://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/budget_creation1.html>and
> budgeting
> history wiki article,<http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Budget_History>but I'm
> completely confused by the GnuCash budget tool.. I can't get things to add
> up.
>
> It seems 'obvious' that the bottom 4 rows are displaying totals, and that
> the income line should list the total income each period, expenses the
> total expenses. However, I can't seem to find anything that affects these
> lines - they always display 0 no matter what budget details are entered, as
> in the image below. Can anyone shed some light on this?
>
> I can't find a description of what the transfers line is supposed to be?
>
> The total line seems to ignore income and expenses, so I'm very confused as
> to what this is actually for! I must be missing something.
>
> I've also tried the "budget flow" report which looks more promising, but
> I'm very confused by the way GnuCash is making things positive or negative
> and I'm getting crazy numbers out. Happy to post an example.
>
> Any suggestions welcome.
>
> Best wishes,
> Richard.



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