Projected Balances?

[Edward Doolittle]

I have future transactions added to my main chequing account by the GnuCash
scheduler 366 days in advance. There are at least two advantages to setting
it up that way. First, it allows me to anticipate cash flow problems weeks
or months in advance. Second, it allows me to keep an eye on my net assets
for the year. I get a fairly accurate estimate of my net assets for the end
of the year on January 1, and I get a good idea of how unanticipated
changes (e.g., investment gains or losses; unanticipated expenses) affect
my net assets.

The disadvantage is as you have noted: changes in the amount of a
transaction (rent, salary, insurance, etc.) cause inaccuracies which
increase as look-ahead time grows.

I wish that there were a facility for simple editing of a series of future
scheduled transactions that have been added to the account. But there is no
such facility (that I can find). Once the scheduler has placed a
transaction in the account, the scheduler can't edit it.

I have developed a number of work-arounds for this problem. I hope you find
them useful:

0) For simple transactions like insurance, I don't mind editing 12
incorrect transactions by hand when my insurance premiums change. But that
would be rather more annoying with complicated transactions like my pay
cheque with multiple splits.

1) Sometimes I leave the incorrect items that are three or more months in
the future alone, and recognize that the accuracy of my projections
decreases beyond the two month mark. For incorrect items that are one or
two months in the future, I simply duplicate a correct transaction from the
previous month, and delete the incorrect future transaction.

I do that with my pay. My Canada Pension Plan payments cease part way
through the year; in addition, my employment contract stipulates occasional
pay raises. So I have a scheduled transaction that under-estimates my net
pay but includes all the splits that I anticipate. Periodically I manually
correct the incorrect future transactions by just deleting them and copying
(duplicating) a more correct past transaction in their place. I then make
any additional corrections by hand. I have to hand-edit my pay only about
three or four times per year.

2) The above process can be automated in the following manner. Set up three
scheduled transactions. The first is your estimate, which is scheduled 366
days (or whatever) in advance. You should under-estimate income and
over-estimate expenses. The second transaction is the accurate transaction,
which is scheduled only one month in advance. The third transaction is a
reversing transaction for the first, which is also scheduled only one month
in advance. Then when your rent changes, say, you only have to change the
second scheduled transaction. If things get too far out of whack, you can
change the first and third scheduled transactions, but the third must
always reverse the first.

You will have a number of fake transactions above the blue line, but you
will always have the reversing transactions also, so the net effect on your
books will be nil. However, if you wish you can clean things up by removing
both the fake transaction and its reversing transaction whenever the two
are paired.

It's a bit kludgy, but it works for me.

It would be nicer if future transactions added by the scheduler could be
edited in one shot. In fact, editing such transactions wouldn't even be
necessary if the scheduler could delete them and create the edited
transactions in their place. That would be a nice feature request, if it
isn't one already. In the meantime, I'm happy enough with the systems I
have in place. With creative use of duplicate and reversing transactions,
it's usually less work than, say, sending an e-mail to the mailing list.

Edward

On 1 May 2016 at 14:18, Don Ireland <gnucash at donireland.com> wrote:

>
>
> On May 1, 2016 2:34:06 PM CDT, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >On Sun, May 1, 2016 at 10:26 AM, Don Ireland <gnucash at donireland.com>
> >wrote:
> >
> >> I see how to enter Scheduled Transactions but I'm having trouble
> >finding a
> >> way to have it tell me projected balances.
> >>
> >> Ideally, I'd like to pick a future date and see the running balances
> >for
> >> each transaction up to and including that date just like I would if
> >they
> >> were actually entered.
> >>
> >> Is this not possible or am I missing something?
> >>
> >> <https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user>
> >
> >
> >You aren't missing anything -- it's not there. The transactions don't
> >exist
> >in your accounts until they've been created. You can even create a
> >scheduled transaction without an amount -- you can put variables in the
> >register and the "Since Last Run" dialog will prompt to fill in the
> >amounts, for instance.
> >
> >If you already know the transaction amounts and you merely want to keep
> >sufficient balances, you could go ahead and enter future-dated
> >transactions
> >into the register. Or you could schedule future-dated scheduled
> >transactions a month (or however long) in advance so you don't have to
> >enter them all at once.
> >
> >
> >>
> >> -----
> >> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> >> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> >>
> That's one part of Quicken that I used almost as much as actually entering
> transactions.  I used it to to look ahead to ensure that I maintain
> sufficient funds.  It allowed me to see that in about six months, I'm going
> to have a shortfall of around $x and plan accordingly by reducing my
> miscellaneous spending between now and then.
>
> But I don't want to add future dated transactions because that would
> potentially cause lots of problems on its own (just two examples):
>
> 1) what happens when the rent goes up?
> 2) I trade in my car for a different one.  All the future dated car
> payments need to be deleted - - sure hope one doesn't get missed - - and
> new future dated car payments need entered.
>
> If GC were to "pretend" that today is actually xx days on the future and
> show me what the balances would be (since my scheduled transactions are all
> set up for auto entry), that would get the job done.
> Don Ireland
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-- 
Edward Doolittle
Associate Professor of Mathematics
First Nations University of Canada
1 First Nations Way, Regina SK S4S 7K2

« Toutes les fois que je donne une place vacante, je fais cent mécontents
et un ingrat. »
-- Louis XIV, dans Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Chap. XXVI