A crucial GNUCash feature that is missing, but easy to implement for budgets

[Steven Miller]

I am referring to YTD variances.  There would be a couple of ways of going about it.  The easiest and first thing to do would be to have the YTD variances show up at the bottom of each month in the "budget report" for the specified period  (at the bottom you would have totals for actual expenses, budgeted expenses, and the variance.  These totals would reflect YTD.  The only values that would change dynamically would be the actual and variance totals as the budget values are set in the budget itself.  This would give you an overall YTD or running total of how you was doing on a month to month basis, which honestly, I don't know how anyone could track a budget effectively without doing this).  Having this all in one view (the budget report) would extremely useful and would increase the value of the budget report enormously.


The next thing that could be done could be to extend the above feature to have YTD for each account (you could think of them as viewing the accounts as categories in this context), but my original inquiry was for the feature described in the first paragraph.  If all that was implemented was what is described in the first paragraph then I would be happy.  Anything further would be bonus feature [😊] .


-Steven


________________________________
From: gnucash-user <gnucash-user-bounces+smille89_k=hotmail.com at gnucash.org> on behalf of Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2017 5:31 AM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: A crucial GNUCash feature that is missing, but easy to implement for budgets

Are you asking for just the variance for that month, or a separate year-to-date variance column?

From what I see, the individual monthly variances are already there. And yes, a YTD variance would be VERY helpful.


> On Jan 14, 2017, at 6:27 PM, gnucash-user-request at gnucash.org wrote:
>
> From: Steven Miller <Smille89_K at hotmail.com <mailto:Smille89_K at hotmail.com>>
> Subject: A crucial GNUCash feature that is missing, but easy to implement for budgets
> Date: January 14, 2017 at 6:27:17 PM CST
> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>>
>
>
> All,
>
> I started using GnuCash recently and I love it!  I got a handful of my friends hooked on it also.  Despite all the features and good things about it, there is one super simple feature missing that I have to have to make it effective for me.
>
> The feature I need is on the budget report.  I really need to be able to see the month totals for the difference/variance (actual - budget) columns for each month.  I realize this feature is available for the end of year/budget period, but it would be much more useful to have a checkbox in the options that allows you to also see the totals for each month rolled up in this view.
> The feature seems like for someone that understood the code it would essentially take only a couple of hours to implement (honestly, I think somebody could just take a sum of the difference column, actual - budgeted, and have this displayed at the bottom of each month, and thus keep a running total of where you were at.  I was using excel sheets before and I was able to do this with sum formulas and adding and subtracting math :).
>
> It is difficult to do budgeting unless you can accurately track where you are currently at.  I know I could hack it and beat around the issue by having my budget only display a single month, but this becomes really cumbersome when needing to also see the entire period.
>
> I really don't want to have to back to using excel sheets as GnuCash beats Excel in almost every area, but I do need this basic utility to effectively budget.  Is there anyone that is willing to put this feature in or that can tell me how to do it so that I can possibly put it in?
>
> Thanks,
> Steven

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