Manually Post Scheduled Transactions

[Edward Doolittle]

I don't know anything at all about MS Money, but in general I would suggest
it would be wise to abandon notions of how other software handles issues
and instead try to do it in "the GnuCash way", or at least in "one of the
GnuCash ways".

This is how I personally handle scheduled transactions: I set up GnuCash
periodic scheduled transactions for all of my periodic transactions
(utility bills, mortgage, and my regular pay, for example). I overestimate
expenses and underestimate income. I do my best to estimate the dates of
the transactions. In the description, I add "(EST)" or "(Estimate)". I set
it up so that the transactions are automatically (not manually) posted to
my accounts a certain period in advance. (I use 366 days, although that's
extreme. Others on this list seem more likely to use 1 or 2 months.)

When more information becomes available, for instance when I receive a
utility bill or pay stub, I manually correct the posted transaction (date
and all the amounts) and remove "(EST)" from the description. Sometimes I
correct a whole year in advance, like when I get new insurance contracts,
for example.

Regularly I will search all accounts for transactions with descriptions
containing "(EST)" which are dated on or before the current date. Those are
transactions for which the necessary corrections are urgent. You can either
do a global "Find" for such transactions or use Doug Doughty's new
transaction report which hasn't yet made its way into a standard release
(but I hope is on its way there). One advantage to Doug's report is that
you can save it so you don't have to re-enter the search terms each time
you want to run the search.

Finally, I ensure that everything is correct by regularly reconciling all
my accounts to the extent possible. (I reconcile almost everything except
my income and expense accounts, and cash, the use of which I try to
minimize.)

Scheduled transactions are (for me at least) not a way to reduce workload.
In fact, they probably increase my workload, because sometimes I have to
make multiple different corrections to transactions. (My pay, especially,
is like that. I occasionally receive pay raises which are hard to predict
in advance. Recently, a regular deduction for university club dues was
stopped when the club unexpectedly folded. So that's two corrections I
(could have) made to a year's worth of pay transaction estimates. (Lazily,
I didn't make the corrections because they're small and in the right
direction, so I can reasonably leave the corrections until I receive the
pay stubs. On the other hand, utility rate increases mean that I do have to
make corrections to the scheduled transaction template and a year's worth
of estimated scheduled transactions.)

Scheduled transactions are (for me) a way to get good cash flow
projections, and to provide a framework to allow me to plan better and to
make small edits rather than wholesale changes to my financial records.

Scheduled transactions are inevitably just estimates. So the question is
when they will be corrected. Personally, I'm comfortable with leaving a
year's worth of uncorrected future estimates in my accounts as long as they
are marked as estimates and they are in the right direction (income low,
expenses high). The difference with the MS Money approach seems to be that
they are not comfortable posting any estimates at all. If that's the issue,
my suggestion to you is to loosen that restriction, allow GnuCash to post
estimates, and then correct them regularly.

(The one issue I have with this whole process is in estimating
discretionary credit card expenses which are not periodic. In that case I
include estimated credit card payments which reflect my budget, and include
a lump sum transfer from credit card to "miscellaneous expenses" which I
later decrease as actual charges accrue, and then delete. It's a bit crude
but seems to work well enough.)



On 23 July 2017 at 11:54, pfwoolverton at juno.com <pfwoolverton at juno.com>
wrote:

> I am struggling with Schedule in GC 2.6.16.  I want to manually post
> scheduled transactions and have the transactions show dates I select.
>
> I reviewed the Concepts Guide and the Help Manual, and searched the user
> archives without success.  I have bits and pieces, but still do not
> understand how to manually post the transactions.
>
> My prior experience is with MS Money 3.0.  MS Money shows a window with a
> list of future transactions.  To post a transaction in MS Money, I select
> it and update fields such as date, amount, and memo.  Then I enter the
> transaction.  The transaction is posted and a new, future transaction is
> created in the list.
>
> I would like step-by-step instructions on how to manually post a scheduled
> transaction starting with a transaction which is not set to be created by
> GC.  Is there a source for such instructions?
>
>
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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