Projected Balances?

[Lewis Balentine]

I was just looking at the DB tables. There is one "schedxactions" but 
there is no data in it for the transaction itself. There is one field 
labelled "template_act_guid" (32 character text). I am going to make a 
wild guess that it is using a previous transaction as its template ... 
thus editing the 'template' would lead to other problems.

On 05/04/2016 02:19 PM, Edward Doolittle wrote:
> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnucash-user mailing list
>> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>> -----
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>
>
>